Some Thoughts on Writing a Novel (Video by Joe Mahoney)

Here's Joe Mahoney talking about writing his novel, A Time and A Place.

It's a pretty good summary of the process and principles I think most successful writers come to live by. (He ended up with a pretty great book.)

The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

The Fantasy Novelist's Exam is a list of common cliches in fantasy, so if you find any of these elements in your own story, you need to immediately edit them out... I think this was intended to be humorous, but as an editor, I'm not laughing because I indeed see all of these things across my desk way too often.

In Praise of the Hobby Writer

The wrong attitude—go ahead, try it!

One response to the explosion of vanity self-publishing (as opposed to professional authors choosing to cut out the middle man) is for authors to emphasize the difference between 'professional' authors, and the 'amateur' or 'hobby' writer.

The emphasis on 'professional' is outdated. (Actually 'professional' was never a real thing: read my literature review article on professionalism.) As I argued last post, whether one can make a living as a writer has more to do with being in the right place at the right time than anything else. (This is particularly true for all those early adopters who have written books on how they made millions through social media—none of which tricks are still valid by the time you read about them....) And, as is obvious to anyone flipping through any best seller (e.g.,books by Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer, etc) it's often not about the quality of the writing. The hobby writer is as likely—perhaps even more likely—to be a great writer, given that they may not be trying to cash in on the latest trend or reach the widest possible demographic, as do those aiming for the best-seller list. There is nothing wrong with writing and publishing for the art of it, and making a living some other way. Most of the writers I most admire have a day job or the support of an employed spouse.

One of my very favourite writers, and my favourite example of a hobby writer, is H.A. Hargreaves, whose 1976 SF collection was the first ever marketed as "Canadian science fiction". I used his stories to define Canadian SF almost as long as I have been lecturing on the topic (35 years) and he was recently (Oct, 2015) inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. His collection, reprinted and still available as North by 2000+, contains only 15 stories, but it has had a profound effect on Canadian SF, influencing an entire generation of authors that followed. But his biggest influence on me was the realization that hobby writing was okay. Hargreaves was a Professor of English at the University of Alberta, and his academic work kept him too busy to write—except for one week each year he took off to write one story. Not what you'd call a professional level of output. (Contrast that with 2015's other inductee into the Hall of Fame, Dave Duncan, whose recent release, The Eye of Strife, was his 50th published novel.) Nevertheless, over the course of nearly two decades, Hargreave's stories added up, not just to his North by 2000+ collection, but to a significant contribution to the genre.

Hargreaves was clearly not writing for the money, and he was not writing for the lowest common denominator to get on the best seller list; he was writing for himself. What he wrote were some of the finest short SF stories ever, and he pioneered the genre of Canadian science fiction. Each of his stories was originally submitted to John W. Campbell, the leading American SF editor of the time, who rejected each story in turn with a two page letter explaining how the story would have to be rewritten to fit into the pages of Analog. In each case, Hargreaves ignored the rejection, and the advice, and sent the story on to the British magazine New Worlds where it was published as is. Rather than change his story for the American market, Hargreaves stuck to his guns, and created something really new and worthwhile.

I aspire to someday get to the level of a Hargreaves. I am never going to be a full time writer because I could not possibly earn more writing than I did as a professor, and I insist on a better lifestyle than the gentile poverty that defines the life of most of my writer friends. I love writing and editing, and put some effort into getting better at both, but the amount of money available from these activities is not sufficient to take seriously as a career. As a hobby, I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. As an avocation, writing is something I am passionate about and I hope that I have some talent for. I seem to be able to get whatever I write published, but thanks to other demands on my time, I only seem to average about one or two stories a year.

Quantity and quality are different dimensions, however, and vague ideological terms like 'professional' tend to confabulate these two very different criteria along with the (largely random) criteria of 'sales'. Just because Stephenie Meyer has made more sales and more money than I will ever see, does that necessarily qualify Stephenie Meyer as a better writer than some hobbyist? I don't think so. I'll grant her the status of more influential writer, because far more people have read her writing than those published in SF mags or small press anthologies. I'll happily grant her the status of major writer, because her books have taught a lot of kids (including my then 12 year old) how to read. In spite of my reservations about the Twilight series, realizing that my daughter's lifetime reading page count tripled in the week it took her to read through all the Twilight books, yeah, I owe Stephenie Meyer a lot. You go girl! But is she a better writer than the hundreds of hobby writers I know? Not so much.

I'm on the membership committee of various writers' organizations, and the issue of the hobby writer comes up a lot, especially now that some many people are self-publishing. On the one hand there are those that are trying to keep the organization an exclusive club, defining membership criteria in dollars and cents or copies sold or some other measure of professionalism to keep the vanity self-publishers out. I have some sympathy for this view. I do meet a lot of wannabes who don't qualify in my mind because they are uninterested in learning to write. These vanity self-publishers are motivated by get-rich-quick dreams where readers are supposed to flock to their badly written first drafts and turn over large quantities of cash in return for very little effort. These are the authors who put no effort into learning their craft, who are too incompetent to recognize the extensive flaws in their structures, who care little for grammar or spelling, and who are deaf to feedback that might help them improve. There is little passion for writing in such individuals, just gigantic egos and a craving for fame and fortune.

Such individuals are, however, the minority. A loud, obnoxious minority that gets more than its fair share of attention by virtue of how annoying they can be, but still not the norm.

Most of the hobby writers I meet are NOT vanity self-publishers.

(If you were wondering if I might be bashing you in the preceding tirade, allow me to assure you this is not the case. Anyone who reads obscure posts on writing is by definition not the sort of non-learner to whom I was referring. Further, if you feared even for a moment that I might be talking about you, then by definition you are not that sort of ego maniac.)

Most hobby authors are talented writers trying to hone their craft to produce quality work. I would very much like them to be able to join writers' groups/communities and become part of the conversation. They, like H.A.Hargreaves, have much to contribute to that conversation; to the discourse that is our culture. Excluding them by imposing some arbitrary quantity of sales seems to miss the point entirely. (I would much prefer some test of quality, but fully understand that the subjective nature of the assessment makes such evaluations untenable.) So I would prefer to loosen the criteria to allow more people to participate in the conversation, rather than form a too exclusive club.

Similarly, at writer's conventions (though notably not the case at either When Words Collide or CanCom) I often see a hierarchy imposed on the gathering based on sales....but this completely wrong-headed. The hobby writers are often as interesting and knowledgeable as the full-time, commercially successful writers. New writers tend to flock to the full-time/commercial professionals in hopes of discovering the secret of their success. Since the secret is they hit the trend at exactly the right moment; or they discovered an overlooked audience, or—and this does happen occasionally—they happen to write really well; asking for the secret handshake that gets one into the big publishers rather misses the point. Asking about how to pace a scene; or starting a discussion of whether prologues are ever acceptable; or talking about how to manage the writing process—those are the conversations that help one improve one's writing. And a long-time hobbyist is as likely to have useful comments to contribute to that discussion as the big seller.

So please, let us not confabulate "hobby writer" with either "rank beginner" or "vanity self-publisher". There is nothing wrong with writing part-time. Indeed, Chaucer had a day job (as Minister of Public Works, no less), as did Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges and Lewis Carroll, and well, pretty much everybody before the pulp era. (And folks, the pulp era is over). Indeed, I would make the argument that the part-timer might be a purer form of the profession, because they are motivated by the need for self-actualization (the 'need' to write) and write according to their own vision, rather than trying to match some commercial formula dictated by the best seller genre. Or, to put it another way, the part-timer is less likely to prostitute their art for filthy lucre..... :-)

Related Posts: Why we published North by 2000+

Barbara Geiger on the Secret of Good Writing

I asked Barbara if I could reprint this column on the secret to good writing because what she had to say resonated strongly with me as both a writer trying to fix my own novel, and as an editor trying to fix everyone else's. Words to live by folks.

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It's really stupid, and I'm sure it's common knowledge to some, but it was hardwon for me. If you're asking someone to pay their after work and social obligations time and their after taxes and fixed expenses money, you're providing a service like any other person out there who has something and wants money for it. If that's the case, your story has to be worth something, and that something has to be as much entertainment as what that ten dollars and four hours *could* be doing.

Which means not only do you have to catch the attention of the pre-reader with the kind of character, problem and world that from page one is going to make the exhausted, underpaid and over-worked intern think that she wants her boss to come back from lunch so she could share this amazing ______, which doesn't have to be the best _______ out there, it has to just tell from the very beginning why it's going to be different from every other _____ out there. But then, after the amazing beginning, you need to leave a trail of bread crumbs, from about every 1000-1500 words that you can point out to your ideal reader and say *this. This part is going to tickle you*.

And then follow the formula where every single time you don't know what to do, or you find your main characters just leaning around and talking, you throw the worst possible thing at them. You need to have all the parts line up and it needs to say something about the world that when someone asks you what's it about, you can say "it's about overcoming your fate and crushing all those who oppose you" rather than "it's a girl who does stuff." And when all of *that* comes together (you know, just pluck the ace of spades out of a card deck eleven times in a row) you've got a great story.

Which is like saying...lose weight by diet and moving more. We all know *what* we have to do, but I've found ways of figuring out *how* to make sure all of those are done in a way that other people think I've accomplished the same goal. Which is the 90% of the problem I was talking about. I'd thought I knew all the cheats around so I didn't have to eat less and exercise more, but then I figured out for *me* at least, the best way to lose weight is to do the obvious things. Some people plunge into an ice pool and use SCUBA gear to breathe because being cold burns more energy. I don't know if that works just as well, but yeah. I figured out that the things people have been telling me since the beginning were, no fooling, the only way I figured out how to write after fifteen years. I'm not saying I'm the brightest person out there, but learning to know that you need to learn how to know to write is again, 90% of the battle.

And the how is...you just do it. We talk about writing as though the answers are multiple choice and we just need to recognize the work when we see it. That's the lowest level of "knowing" how to do something. There are five or six, but it ends with synthesizing new things from what we know about two different things. So the "how" is to show your work that you know the rules of writing. Life is long answer format.

Start with a main character who has a problem. You don't need to know the iceberg level of the problem, you need to see what the tip the MC says. Characters who see the whole issue are like the AI characters in the Two Towers who were smart enough to look at the problem and run in the opposite direction. Big problems need big pay grades. Small problems need characters who just need to step out of their life momentarily.

Then as they figure out what the problem is, so do you. You're learning what they're learning, then as soon as you know what the iceberg problem is, in your rewrite you rewrite it like you knew what the whole problem was from the very beginning and as soon as you know what your character doesn't, it's really easy to provide the clues in the rewrite to the audience.

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Another thing I see a lot as an editor is the talented youngster who fails to fulfill their promise. I like what Barbara has to say about that too:

I remember how absolutely sure I felt in my 20's that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong and that the last thing I needed to do was learn how to write. I thought I just needed to be discovered. Coming to the realization that what I was writing wasn't very good and that I had to learn how to write in my thirties was a major shock to the system. So many writers, like me, had started life just a little bit wiser than most--which makes you brilliant at 17 and so stupid at 27--if you've never had to learn that that little bit of extra you started with is just a drop in the pan to what's possible when you put your mind to it.

I can relate to that, only just add a few decades to the ages given. Just now starting to get a glimmer of maybe how to start writing stories that work--most of which I learnt by editing other people and then turning around and saying, "Oh wait, I screwed that up in exactly the same way!"

As Barbara would say, if you're not selling, learn to write better.

Writing Process Blog Hop

I have been tagged by Joe Mahoney in a Blog Hop.

This means that I was interviewed about my writing process by Joe Mahoney here on my blog, because he was tagged and interviewed on his writing process on his blog by author/film-maker Susan Rodgers, who was interviewed about her writing process on her blog by Beryl Belsky who...well, you get the idea.

As a recording engineer for CBC Radio, Joe has recorded, mixed, and created sound effects for more than one hundred radio plays ranging from The Muckraker to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version. Joe has also written radio plays (The Cold Equations, Captain’s Away!), produced them (Steve the Second), directed them (Canadia: 2056) and story-edited entire series (Steve the First, Steve the Second, Canadia: 2056.)

As a writer/producer, Joe has been a finalist twice for the Aurora Award, Canada’s top science fiction award (for Faster Than Light with Robert J. Sawyer and Six Impossible Things with Nalo Hopkinson) and won a Mark Time Silver Award for Best Science Fiction Audio Production of the Year 2005 (for Steve the Second). Joe is also a published author with several plays and short stories under his belt. He is also darned near finished his first novel.

These days when he's not writing he works as Manager of Digital Production Maintenance for CBC Radio & Television and lives in Whitby, Ontario with his wife and two children.

These are Joe's questions to me:

Joe: You wear many hats. You're recently retired from the University of Lethbridge, where you had a successful career as a sociology professor. You're also a writer of speculative fiction, an editor, an essayist, a reviewer, and a family man. How have you found the time to write? How do all of your activities and interests inform your writing, fiction and otherwise?

Robert: The short answer would be that I mostly can't find the time to write.

Writers like to have blocks of free time to just think / write, and I haven't had that anytime in the last 30 years. The reality is that almost no one makes a living writing fiction these days, so most of us have to devote time and effort to our day jobs, and I chose a career that places a lot of demands on one's time. That lesson plan has to be ready when the class is scheduled to start, so lesson planning and marking and advising students have to take precedence over one's own writing. And publish or perish is a reality in my line of work, so research necessarily took much of my after hours time. You can't say to your students, or to your Dean, or to your own kids, "I'm sorry, I can't do that right now, I'm working on my novel." Even taking early retirement to free up time for writing hasn't been entirely successful because my editing work just expanded to fill that time, and because there is always more you should be doing for family—the work expands to fill the time available.

I tried using NaNoWriMo to get down on paper one of several novels that had been floating around my head for years. I would think my way through stories while walking the dog or washing the dishes or otherwise having a quiet moment, but that's just daydreaming unless you can get it down on paper. But November is a busy month for anyone in academia, so NaNoWriMo is not entirely suitable. So my wife started organizing writing retreats at other times of the year for me. I usually can only get away for ten days or so, but that's been enough to allow me to get out a story a year and to have made real progress on my first novel.

I take my inspiration here from H. A. Hargreaves, whose collection of short stories was the first ever marketed as Canadian SF (North by 2000; reprinted in expanded edition in 2012 as North by 2000+).

Hargreaves could only budget one or two weeks a year to write, but over the course of his lifetime he produced a significant body of work and was a major influence on other Canadian SF writers. The idea that one has to write full-time to be taken seriously is a mistake. It's quality not quantity that should matter. I wish I had more time to write, but I also love editing and teaching and researching and parenting, and so on. I write when I can find time, and that just has to be enough.

As for the second question, I think all writing, if it is any good, is influenced by the author's daily activities. My most recent short story, for example, is about a teacher talking to students as they line up to leave the classroom. It's right out of my daily experience as both a parent waiting to collect my child and as a teacher-trainer. Similarly, even though my novel is old-fashioned SF and I've never lived on a spaceship, the characters and relationships are pretty much right out of my life.

Of course, my writing is heavily influenced by life as a reviewer, critic and editor. I've been very conscious in my writing of not making the mistakes I see in other SF. For example, it's always driven me crazy when the hero breaks into the alien space ship and simply announces, "these must be the warp drive controls", or looks at a couple of buildings and immediately deduces correctly that the aliens are part of a hive mind, or solves the central mystery of the book on the first try. So I made sure my characters get things wrong all the time and make the sort of mistakes people actually make when confronted with new information. And so on. Of course, in avoiding the usual clichés I have undoubtedly invented a whole new range of mistakes of my own....

Joe: You're currently putting the finishing touches on your science fiction novel, The Flight of the Illynov. At the same time you're editing for Five Rivers Publishing. How does the editing part of you get along with the writing part of you? How does it help or hurt the writing process having that editing experience and knowledge?

Robert: Having experience as an editor, I can edit my work as I go, so that allows me to avoid a lot of the usual errors, but I also have to be careful to turn my own editor off from time to time, particularly in the early stages of writing when a book or story is still relatively fragile. As an editor, one has to be able to look past a manuscript as it is and see what it might be. That's even more true for one's own work. There's a temptation to say, "this isn't that good" and give up on it rather than to try to make it better, but the truth is, no first draft is any good; it's always about the rewriting. Being too critical too early is always a mistake.

I wrote a column last year on what it was like to send my manuscript off to an editor, both knowing that every manuscript needs to be edited, and secretly hoping that my manuscript would be the exception. It wasn't!

Joe: What have been your biggest challenges writing The Flight of the Illynov?

Robert: Besides the ever-present problem of finding the time to work on it, the fundamental problem with my novel is that after the first 70 pages or so of action, I stuck my characters on a spaceship for a year and a half. I don't know what I was thinking. Because sitting around talking in the ship's mess for 200 pages does not leave a lot of room for action. All my characters ever want to do is talk. I tried blowing up their world, having them arrested, blowing up their ship, having them arrested by the other side, blowing up their ship again, starting a war, but whatever I did, the protagonists just tries to talk his way out of it. So I worry that it's too much talking heads, that it drags in places. But I'm working on that.

Joe: What is your writing process? Do you have a set time and place to write, or any writing rituals that need to be in place? Do you ever find yourself procrastinating and if so, what do you do about it?

Robert: I used to procrastinate a lot, but I don't have time for that anymore. If my wife books a retreat for me, that's a lot of family time and money riding on my being productive, and it's my one shot at writing uninterrupted for the year. So I pretty much have to get on with it.

In terms of place, what happened was I wanted to go to a retreat at the Banff Center that Robert Sawyer was leading, but there was a death in the family that year, so that just didn't happen for me. The next year the retreat leader was a wonderful poet, but frankly, my novel is about story and humour, not poetical language, so I wasn't sure that would be the right retreat for my manuscript. And my wife looked at the fees and said, "That's a lot of money if you're not sure about the workshop aspect. Hell, I could put you on a cruise for a quarter of price, if you just want time to write." And we looked at each other, and I said, "Um, okay." So ever since I go on a cruise by myself each year. I take an inside cabin so it's both cheap and dark—I want dark so I can sleep whenever I run out of steam, and write as late as a like. I frequently work round the clock. When I was writing the scenes on the spaceship, my wife booked me into the cabin next to the engine room—the unceasing beat of the engines made for appropriate atmosphere for my writing about life on a spaceship! But the best thing is, there is great food available around the clock, much better than at any retreat. And when I want to stretch my legs, there is the track on the deck or a quick walk around whatever port we happen to be in that day. So that works pretty well.

My biggest problem with writing rituals is that when I pause to work out some problem in a scene, whether I am on a cruise or stealing an hour at work, I take that break by going for a snack. That's never a good idea, healthwise. So I am trying to substitute either a jog around the deck or a mug of tea. My favorite tea is David's Chocolate Chili Chai or Mighty Leaf Vanilla. That's almost as good as a snack.

At work I have a treadmill desk, so I am walking all the time I am writing. That's working really well for keeping energy up.

Joe: As an editor, you know that professional writers, although skilled in their trade, still require editors. In your experience, what do professional writers typically get wrong that editors like you can help them with?

Robert:I've tried writing about the most common errors I encounter in my blog here, so I've already covered some of that: starting the story too early; forgetting that "less is more"; mistaking physical descriptions for characterization; and so on. But the truth is, every author has particular strengths and weaknesses, so all the advice columns in the world can only help so much. You see some manuscripts where the author is totally abusing adverbs, and so you get some American editors/writers (e.g., Stephen King) making the ridiculous pronouncement that, "adverbs are always bad". And then I get manuscripts where the writing fails because the writer has lost what is actually an important part of speech—that manuscript could actually have benefited from the insertion of a couple of adverbs. Practically any advice I have given to one author turns out to be the exact opposite of what I need say to another. You need to actually have an editor to tell you whether your problem is that you are too verbose or overly concise; too much description or too sparse; too much explanation or too little. It's hard to judge these things for oneself, to tell whether the pacing is working or the mystery is too obvious or whatever. For beginning writers, some general do's and don'ts might be helpful— The Turkey City Lexicon is still the best resource for beginning SF writers—but for professional writers it's hard to suggest one-size-fits-all advice. With published authors, it's largely either a question of identifying some logical loophole they've missed or a matter of refinement. Either way, the problems are going to be specific to that author or manuscript, rather than something that can be generalized.

Joe: When do you anticipate finishing The Flight of the Illynov? And what's next after that?

Robert:It's hard to say when. There are probably only a couple of week's work left on Flight of the Illynov, but depends when I can free up two weeks to do it. I would really like to be done, but I feel guilty how far behind I am on my editing. I can't stand the thought that other people's careers are on hold until I finish with their manuscripts, so I always priorize editing responsibilities over my own writing. (I know that Lorina Stephens, the publisher at Five Rivers, suffers from the same problem, so that her own writing ends up at the bottom of the to do list.) But I have long suspected that I am a better editor than I am a writer, so that's probably just as well.

Nevertheless, I have two new novels on the go now. The one I intended to do next, on which I made a start while awaiting feedback from my editor; and a completely new idea that just popped into my head two weeks ago but which I was inspired to start on right away. The later is tentatively titled, Semi-Posthumously and would be loosely based on my observations visiting my mom in an old age home, so it's not SF at all. And I have three or four short stories in various stages of completion. And a 'how to' book on examination construction based on my career as a test development specialist...and a book on Canadian SF, and... well you get the idea. Too many projects, too little time.

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Here are the two bloggers I've tagged:

Mike Plested

Michell (Mike) Plested is an author, editor, blogger and podcaster living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the host of several podcasts including Get Published, (2009, 2011 and 2013 Parsec Finalist), the SciFi/Comedy GalaxyBillies (Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Beverley Hillbillies) and Boyscouts of the Apocalypse (Zombie horror meets boyscouts), a part of the Action Pack Podcast.

His debut novel, Mik Murdoch, Boy Superhero was published August 1, 2012 and was shortlisted for the Prix Aurora Award for Best YA Novel. The sequel, Mik Murdoch: The Power Within, is due out August of 2014.

* * * * * * * * * *

Michael Matheson

Michael Matheson is a gender-fluid Toronto (the Canadian one) writer, poet, editor, anthologist, and book reviewer. A Managing Editor (CZP eBooks) with ChiZine Publications, and a Submissions Editor with Apex Magazine, Michael is editing three anthologies for 2015 (Start a Revolution, Exile Editions, Spring 2015; This Patchwork Flesh, Exile Editions, Fall 2015; The Humanity of Monsters, ChiZine Publications, Fall 2015). Michael's own fiction and poetry are published or forthcoming in a number of venues, including Ideomancer, and the anthologies Chilling Tales 2, Dead North, Fractured, Future Lovecraft, Masked Mosaic, and more. The in depth interview on Michael's writing process raises a number of significant issues for readers and writers.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

Coming up on November, so NaNoWriMo time again. Here is an interesting set of posts on whether it is better to plan out one's novel in detail, or to just start writing and see where it goes.

On planning: http://theaccidentalnovelist.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/weekend-workout-prepping-fo-nano-or-not/

On just going with the flow: http://theaccidentalnovelist.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/nanowrimo-2014-team-pantser/

I'm usually some combination of both. I often have an idea that has been perculating in my head for years, often decades, where I have daydreamed various scenes here and there while walking the dog or shoveling snow. So I have a general idea of what the novel is about, who the main characters are, and where the novel is going, but with really only fragments of scenes here and there and big gaps between. No real structure or outline. So NaNoWriMo is a chance to get what I have down on paper and to see if I can connect the dots. The end result is often very different than where I started, and I occasionally write myself into corners by writing blindly; but on the other hand, I often generate new scenes and characters I would never have thought of if I were using a disciplined outline. By writing myself into corners, I force the protagonist to come up with a way to extricate himself, which I would never have thought of in an outline, because I would have known better than place him in that corner in the first place, if I had had a plan. So my hero is much cleverer and a much faster talker than he would have been otherwise.

It's true that I have had to cut whole sections of the novel that haven't worked out, because by going in that direction I precluded something that I realized had to come in later for the novel to work, or that went against character, or otherwise didn't work out. But at 2000 words a day, I could afford to dump a ten or twelve page section and try again; whereas if an outline had called for that scene and it had taken me a month to write, I would be far more reluctant to give up on it, persisting to the point of such frustration that I might be tempted to abandon the whole project as undoable.

I'm also quite a slow writer and tend to write longish novels, so has taken me two to three NaNoWriMo to get first complete draft. Now is the time for outlining, to make sure that I haven't lost track of any of the bits I started with (I lost two of the main characters there for awhile, and had to go back an account for their absence) and that everything works logically. I was actually surprised to find that my subconcious had indeed planted many of the clues in early chapters to foreshadow the unfolding of the mystery, even though I had had no idea what that mystery was when I set out.  So having a first draft, I can go back and get a plan for the revision; I can use what my subconscious provided as raw data and use the resulting outline to tighten everything up so that the structure really works.

Or at least, that's the plan.  Come Friday I start work on my new novel (opening scene clearly in my head, though getting that scene down on paper is a whole other thing) so will have to see how far on the back burner the previous novel gets pushed.

on muses....

I love the title of Krista Ball's column, I don't have a muse, I have a deadline.

Self-Publishing

Interesting blog post on real problems with self-publishing at According To Hoyt. Well worth a read.

Edge Publishing celebrating first decade

Grab your goggles and gear and join them November 20th at 6:30 pm to celebrate EDGE's first decade of publishing quality speculative fiction, fantasy and horror.

Dress in a steampunk costume (optional) and enjoy an enchanting evening of:

Madcap Music and Magic:
With slide guitar virtuoso Ellen McIlwaine.
Parlor prestidigitations by Richard (the magician) Rondeau.
Experience the amazing balloon sculptures of Big D. Wilson.

Tomes and Trivia:
The pseudo-Victorian parlor game that doles out trinkets, trophies, and tea.

Ripped from the Pages:
Listen to a smattering of our new books - read by the actors of Gas & Light Productions.
Attend a command performance of poet Christian Bök.
Enjoy the story telling tales of Lana Skauge and Tom Doyle.

Munching and Crunching:
Finger food for everyone.
Enjoy the latest in steampunk libations from the mad scientists in the EDGE lab.
Be certain to try our special EDGE elixir!

Costume Capers:
Secret judges will declare (at evening's end) the Lord and Lady of the Steampunk Social.

Fun for all:
Get photographed in your costume - steampunk accessories provided!

This celebration takes place in Calgary's historical Aeronautical Space Museum (4629 McCall Way NE, Calgary) on November 20th. Doors open at 6:30 pm with wandering entertainment, and light refreshments. Performance parlor shows begin at 7:30 pm.

Please RSVP by emailing events@hadespublications.com, or by calling EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing at 403-254-0160.

For further information please contact:
Janice Shoults
Marketing and Events
EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing
events@hadespublications.com
www.edgewebsite.com

My own novel

So, I was cleaning out the basement office last week and stumbled upon my old writing files, so I dusted them off and sorted through to find the original outline for the novel I am currently at 90,000 words on. Several facts struck me.

First, the outline (which would have come after a long period of thinking of the story before committing an outline to paper) is dated March 17, 1975. So that means I have had this novel in my head for well over 35 years. The original outline is very close to the current version; as close as I would likely stick to any outline in the actual writing stage. (My characters are the sort who insist on saying what they want, even when it means going off script.) So that's pretty amazing to me considering I haven't seen this outline since filing it in this filing cabinet when I first moved to Lethbridge, 20 years ago. I've added the character of a young boy sometime in the 1990s (because Sean Stewart told me it is next to impossible to write good action SF with kids in it; so, you know, wanted a bit of a challenge) and I added a dog during the actual writing (because I got a dog during the actual writing, and because, you know, the boy needed a dog). So considering it's all just been scenes evolving in my head all those years, bit surprised to see how close I am to original idea.

Second, the two pages of opening scene (all that existed aside from the outline) are hand printed on strips of lined paper stapled to an 8.5 X 11 sheet. That is, I had written a bit, then changed my mind, cut the sentences I wanted to save out of the page, and stapled them to a new sheet, to continue writing; then cut bottom off that page, and stabled surviving paragraph to a new sheet; and repeated this several times until filling the page. Which is how one did word processing, circa 1975.


Third, the initial outline is on a 5X3 index card hand printed in such tiny letters I cannot read it without a magnifying glass. I recall that I used to keep all my notes that way. Unbelievable -- and unreadable -- to me now. I hereby solemnly swear not to take typing for granted again. Long live the keyboard! (If I thought typing 90,000 word manuscript was hard, I cannot imagine what it would have been like writing a novel by hand.

Fourth -- and this really hurts -- are lines like this piece of dialog: "Frayer is well into his fifties, but don't let that throw you, he's a damn good officer." Questions of literary merit aside, it's a little annoying to have one's younger self send such a clear message to me now, saying I am of such an advanced age to be officially over the hill and my competence suspect. *Sigh*

Fifth, re-reading this outline, it appears that I didn't have any ideas back then either for what comes next. I have about three scenes left to cover on the original outline, and then I'm on my own.... 36 years and I still don't know how the stupid book is supposed to end.