Publication Day
The last couple of months have been packed with travel and sickness and visiting family and work on the business. I found out that I didn’t even make it past the pitch round of the Amazon novel contest, and with all the busy-ness, I haven’t come near my writing goals recently. I’d just gotten over the lingering funk of a bad cold and now allergies are massing for the attack. While not all bad and having some very good moments, these months have been trying.
But none of that matters today, because today is Publication Day. My short story “Spider Without a Web” is live on Abyss & Apex. This is my first publication in mumble-mumble years, plus it’s got a fun little POV trick that I’m fond of (if I do say so myself). Hope you enjoy it!
The first line: a phobia (primascriptophobia?)
My friend Robert recently posted a writing exercise he’d done from the prompt: “What is your metaphor for the fear of writing that first line?”
Click to embiggen.
Well, it seems I face that fear with every line when I first sit down to write, whether it’s the first or halfway through, so when I couldn’t come up with a next first line for the story I’m working on, I wrote this instead:
And here is the OCR’d version, with minor edits:
[Top]Typewriter Desks & IKEA
I finally discovered why my hands get tired typing on the Olympia SG-1 even though it appears to be in perfect condition and doesn’t have a carriage shift. The keyboard is half an inch to an inch taller than all the rest of my keyboards. And when you consider that modern computer keyboards are practically flat, that’s quite an incline!
The hideaway typewriter desk that my wife got me for Christmas, while undeniably cool, only really fits one of my typewriters. The carriages on the portables are level with the sides of the top of the desk and don’t really have freedom of movement. The SG-1 and the Hermes Ambassador are too big to fit on the typewriter shelf. Only the Royal KMM fits perfectly–the carriage sticks up a little above the level of the upper desk, and the base of the typewriter fits perfectly on the lower shelf. It’s a good thing that the KMM is one of my favorite typewriters to use.
But, not being satisfied with only having one typewriter easily available to use, I was hoping to get another small desk to serve as a second typewriter desk. A friend of ours was making an IKEA run, so I decided to see what their options were. I found the Laiva for $17.99, which was unbeatable. After an evening spent with an allen wrench and wooden dowels, I had a surprisingly sturdy desk. It’s simple, but a perfect cheap typewriter desk. Highly recommended if all you need is something simple. It’s been a wonderful base to give the Olympia SM-3 the workout it’s deserved. Even though the carriage shift is wearing out my pinky.
A good week to get published…
It’s been a good week on the writing front. Well, the publishing/feedback front of this multi-pronged battle anyway. The actual writing for the week has been disappointing–trying to get back up on the horse after the mad dash of last minute novel editing for ABNA has been difficult.
It was confirmed earlier in the week that my short story, “Spider Without a Web,” will be published in the April issue of Abyss & Apex. This is my first prose sale ever, so it’s a big fucking deal, as our Veep has been known to say. (Strangely enough, I’ve been paid for prose twice before, some *mumble-mumble* years ago, but those were for awards, not for publication.) I am beyond excited and will post a link as soon as it goes live in a few months.
The second bit of goodness will take some explanation. A few years ago I joined the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (thankfully, the name is shortened to OWW). In fact, I got some good feedback for early drafts of “Spider Without a Web” during that first stint of membership. But I let my membership lapse because I was alternating between working on my novel and despairing at the futility of this writing endeavor. Having finally finished the first draft of that novel months before, in December I decided that I really needed some feedback before deciding how to proceed with it. So I re-joined the OWW and uploaded the first few chapters for critique. The response was generally positive, which led to my having the confidence to begin querying agents–although I put that on hold to give the ABNA a go first.
Monthly, the OWW chooses up to four submissions as Editors’ Choices. They tend to be some of the better selections on the workshop at the time, and in addition to the honor, the choices are critiqued by one of their panel of published writers and/or editors. One of those authors is Elizabeth Bear, who has written and had published about a thousand books in the last decade and who is a brilliant effin bloggist.
(Urban Dictionary suggests that “bloggists” are paid and “bloggers” are not. But blogger is a platform so doesn’t sound right describing a person who blogs. Ahem. Where was I?)
About three weeks ago, the OWW sent me a note that one of my novel chapters had been chosen for an Editors’ Choice the next month. Which meant that by the time I had the feedback, I would have already submitted to ABNA. In retrospect, that was probably for the best, because I would have either been locked up with indecision about how to fix the first chapters, or I would have made a complete mess of them instead. The book is off to ABNA, and today I got the critique from OWW. By Elizabeth Bear. Exactly who I’d been secretly hoping for. My heart leaped, it did. She had some reasonable criticisms of the structure and content that will have me beating my head against the manuscript in a few months. But the review was overwhelmingly positive. It overwhelmed me, anyway.
Yeah, it’s been a good week.
Now back on the gorram horse…
[Top]My name is…
Based on a post by Hart Johnson on the ABNA boards mentioning the Reintroduce Yourself Blogfest, I decided to put up a short description of what you have stumbled onto, whether on purpose or inadvertently.
About me: I own and manage a couple of small businesses with my wife (and we work really well together because we very rarely attempt to kill one another). Many years ago, I got a degree in English from the University of Tennessee Knoxville (in my four years there, I never went to a football game, which is heresy to the natives). I’ve been scribbling in one form or another since I could hold a pen. My first book is available self-pubbed over there on the right, and I should have a short story being published by a respectable online publication in the next few months, and my latest novel, which is unpublished, is currently entered in ABNA.
About this blog: I wish it had a theme–albino goldfish or hair extensions for poodles or anything really. But it doesn’t. It’s about the random things that I care enough to write 300 to 1000 words about at a time. These are usually writing, publishing, politics, video games, books, TV shows, movies, comic books, and typewriters. But it could be anything, really.
And that’s about it.
[Top]Fun with OCR
The only problem with using typewriters to compose my first drafts, is that I somehow have to get those words into the computer. I’m currently using PaperPort, but I’ve tried MS Office’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool as well. The computer has mixed results at translating the typewriting pages into document files. I don’t think I had the resolution turned up high enough on this last batch because it was particularly bad. Here’s a funny example:
A painting still hung where the headboard would have been, years of neglect transmuting the colors into a stat brown sky over a burnt orange ocean with sunbeasts that looked like pies raining down from heaven.
Now I want to know what “sunbeasts” are. And why do they look like pies? Mmmm… pie.
[Top]A Brief History of My Typewriters (part 6)
Odds and Ends
There are a few other typewriters in my collection that don’t fit into the three main brands of Royal, Olympia, or Hermes. I’ll wrap up with them.
[Top]A Brief History of My Typewriters (part 5)
Hermes: The Last Gasp
After my Olympia phase, I thought I would just go back to my Royal KMM to finish up the manuscript I was working on, but another brand that was fondly spoken of was the Hermes. (I thought I remembered one being up for auction a while ago used by Cormac McCarthy, but that was an Olivetti. However, Kerouac did use a Hermes 3000.) Unable to be content, I went on the lookout for Hermes typewriters.
[Top]Cat Waxing
I have written a lot of blog posts this week. About halfway through, I realized what I was doing. The time honored tradition of cat-waxing.
There was writing that needed to get done, but instead I was working hard on the one thing that hasn’t gotten much response: my blog. That’s because I was avoiding the more difficult editing, re-writing, and fixing of my novel’s manuscript. Much more fun to talk about my typewriters.
Well, cat-waxing or no, I got my manuscript a bit more polished, and shoved it into the intertubes for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award. How many times have I re-read my <300 word pitch? About a billion. And re-written it? About a million. Is it any better than the first version I wrote? At this point, I have no clue. Sometimes, it seems passable for prose written in the English language. Other times, I think it was written by a toddler in excrement on the bathroom wall.
But it’s done! I’m in. They still allow me to fiddle with it until they reach the cut-off point of 10,000 submissions or January 27th. Though there are probably untold things that could be improved, my sanity would be better served by leaving it alone. Then it’s just a month’s wait until February 13 and I discover whether my pitch was written in English or crap.
I have had a couple of encouraging pieces of writing news in the last week. One of them I can’t really share yet. The other was feedback from an editor on a story that I’d submitted many months ago. I’d queried to see what the status was, and she responded that she’d “loved” it. But it still has another layer of approval before it could be published. Nevertheless, a good ego-boo.
Now, I can get back to my typewriters. And this time maybe it will be for its own sake rather than as an avoidance technique.
[Top]Blogs and Marketing (with Fruit and Meat!)
Marketing your writing with a blog is like a grocer trying to sell meat by giving away fruit.
Maybe Joe likes fruit, but that’s no guarantee he’s going to like your meat. He might even be a vegetarian. Conversely, Pam may like meat, maybe she’s been coming to buy her prime cuts from you for years. Maybe she doesn’t eat much fruit, and she wonders why you’re giving away all this weird foreign fruit instead of discounting her regular meat purchase.
As you may have surmised, I love a good metaphor. I really love taking a good metaphor to its breaking point.
John Scalzi was well known for his blog before he ever became a bestselling science fiction writer. He had been giving away fruit for years. So most of his customers, at least those who weren’t vegetarians (or didn’t like sci-fi), were willing to take him up on his meat special (when his novel Old Man’s War was published). But there are those who like his novels, light military science fiction in the early Heinlein tradition, who are quickly put off by his somewhat liberal leanings and tendency to blog about them. Often, an inflammatory topic will elicit an outraged comment to the effect that “I will never buy any of your books again.”
Orson Scott Card was comfortably in my top three favorite writers in high school and college. The first couple of Ender’s Game books and Seventh Son books remain favorites. Prime cuts. But in the last decade, with the transparency offered by the internet, I’ve learned a lot more about Card’s politics, and frankly, his strange fruit has soured my taste for his literary offerings.
So if you’re a writer, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that you should blog to market your work. If your personality is perfectly in tune with your books, that might make sense. Even then, you are going to do or say something that will piss someone off and lose readers. You also could gain like-minded readers who like both your fruit and meat. My point here is that it’s likely to be a wash. Card seems to be doing fine even though he’s pissed off half the blogosphere. Ditto Scalzi.
I’m going to blog for myself and anyone who happens to stumble along and think what I type is worth their time. Basically the same way I write books and stuff.
Write what you want. What’s the point of it otherwise?
I don’t think this holds true just for writing. Most good marketing is just human beings sharing what they’re interested in and think is cool. Word of mouth is the ultimate. Trying to goose people into buying crap they don’t want is manipulative and douchebaggy. Telling people what’s cool is being a good human being. Which do you want to be?
Then be that kind of marketer.
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