A post prompted by a comment on last week’s post. It feels a bit smug, because I’ve been on a selling spree, culminating in the sale of a novel. The advice below, though, is going to be pretty crude:

How do you sell your fiction?

1. Finish it. You’d be amazed how many novels or stories are started and never finished.

2. Workshop it. If you’re still writing in your attic and have never shown your writing to anyone, it’s high time you did. It may well save you a lot of heartache and embarrassment. Don’t show your fiction to your family, show it to a bunch of strangers calling themselves writers.

3. Edit it. Rip the plot apart, turn it upside down and inside out. Work on your writing style. Polish, have people read it and polish it again. Rinse and repeat.

4. Submit it. You’d also be amazed how much work is never submitted. Writers get discouraged after one or two rejections and let novels and stories languish. This year I’ve made 120 submissions for both novels and short stories.

5. Expect rejection for the simple reason that most magazines, agents and publishers have a 99% rejection rate. Celebrate rejection. Turn it into a race with your writer friends (who can get the most rejections in a year?). Every rejection represents a submission. It was my aim to get 100 rejections in 2009, and I turned my adventures into a blog post series.

6. Keep submitting no matter what. The nature of acceptance is fickle and very subjective. Up until mid-October, I hadn’t sold a single thing. Since then, I’ve sold six short stories and a novel. If this hadn’t happened, I would have set the same target for next year.

7. Submitting is crapshoot. Any magazine or publisher which publishes the type of fiction I’m trying to sell is fair game. I look at their range, at online material. If they publish speculative fiction, I send it.

7a. Consider the marketability of your fiction. Does a market ask for fiction with, for example, strong female characters, gay or lesbian characters, a romance thread, horror? Do you have something that might possibly suit that market? Could you, for example, adapt a novel so you could peddle it to the plethora of small presses that specialise in horror?

8. There are many other venues to sell a short story than the big-name magazines. There many other venues to sell a novel than getting an agent and hoping for a bite from the big publishers. Try all avenues. Submit, submit, submit.

If you don’t submit, you will never be published

Here’s another NaNo post.

Various people around the internet have added their voice to the advice of what to do when the novel you’re writing goes off-track. Here’s a sample

And this is my approach, added here to give different strategies, because there is not one that will work for everybody.

Invariably, all my novels go off-track during early drafts. I’m a pants writer, and that’s the nature of the beast. Sometimes off-track doesn’t end up being as much off-track as you thought. The question is how far are you going to let it flounder before you recognise the problem. For me, that’s increasingly less far. I try to nip the problem in the bud before I write too much. I always try to project the effects of a particular scene further down in the novel. But still, sometimes things go pear-shaped.

In that case, I stop writing immediately (and to hell with mandatory word count goals).

I grab a notebook and sketch out the plot as I’ve got, and as projected. I write down character motivations and conflicts. Often, I’ll find that conflicts don’t align. For example, a heroine wants something, but what the antagonist wants is not directly opposed. Sometime I find that I’ve got simply too many things going on at the same time. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is usually the best approach. Choose your conflict and deal with it in depth.

It might mean the depth is still lacking from the conflict. I don’t *quite* know what’s going on yet, or why, or what the consequences are. In that case, I will move my backside to Wikipedia and start reading about the subject of the conflict. This process, besides landing me with inordinate amounts of physics and chemistry, usually ends up giving me specific ideas that slot into the story as I’ve already written, or that could be made to fit with some alterations.

Now I start with an empty file. For me, this is a vitally important part of the process. The empty file is a blank page. It’s not filled with words to which I may feel attachment because I liked them so much, never mind that they don’t fit in the plot. I start copying scenes from the old draft only when I decide those scenes should go in the new draft. Sometimes scenes need to be rewritten or changed. I do that after I copy them, one by one, so that the new draft will reflect the tighter storyline.

I may need to repeat this process two or three times.

I have now logged more than 150 slush pieces for ASIM and I thought I’d write a bit about the experience.

I’d like to tackle the incredulous question asked by a dismayed writer: can you really tell within one paragraph whether or not a submission is going to work for you? (please note the for you in this sentence – every reader and editor is different).

The answer has to be: usually, yes.

Trying to quantify why is probably harder, aside from submissions with poor grammar (of which there are surprisingly few) or punctuation (of which there are a lot more – learn to punctuate dialogue, dudes!), but I’ve run across a few issues I can identify, one of which is:

The piece has a poor handle on POV (point of view).

Consider the following start of a short story (which I’m making up on the spot up for the purpose of demonstration):

She held the gun tightly.
David followed her up the stairs, wheezing and clutching his side. His hair was plastered to his forehead. ‘I’m not used to this anymore,’ he panted.
She pushed away revulsion. Since when had he let himself go? He used to be so fit.
‘In here?’ she asked, nodding at the door.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If I lay my hands on the bastard who has my son…’

This start does a number of things right: there is action, the prose is functional, not overly wordy, and we are thrown into a situation that makes the reader wonder.

But who is the POV character? This piece of text tells us far more about David than about the main character, who – for crying out loud – doesn’t even have a name yet. She seems to be some sort of kick-arse gun-wielding assassin, but we don’t know. We don’t know why she’s there (presumably because she’s paid, in which case her motivation for being there is not very strong) or what she’s feeling except for contempt for David (and this doesn’t make me like this anonymous person).

I’ve found this sort of thing very common in the slush pile. I wouldn’t press instant-reject, but I’d read on to see if the main character becomes more defined. Usually, though, this doesn’t happen. The POV in the story is neither well-defined, nor is the main character the person whose story the writer is telling. From the above crappy example, I’d say this is David’s story.

A few thoughts on this matter:

- For crying out loud, name your main character as soon as he/she enters the story (* and **).
- Consider who the best character is to carry the story. Who has most to lose?
- Write the story as if you were that person. The most prominent emotions and impressions will be that person’s.

* There are some plot types where not naming a character is a plot point. Try avoid this, though, unless you’re 100% certain that it’s necessary.

** Naming a character is impossible when you write in first person. In that case, I’d advocate getting an ‘I’ into a sentence before you mention any other characters. Definitely don’t wait until other characters have been doing things for half a page.

This seems to be one of those topics that never goes away.

You may say that it’s easy for me to talk about this since I have lots of time for writing, but that wasn’t always so. I wrote my three non-fiction books at the time I was employed full-time and had three preschoolers. So let me share a few thoughts about it.

The first one is going to be a no-brainer: do you really want to write? Because it takes time, a lot of time, for which you’ll receive little reward, which will have you cut off from your family and social activities. For this reason, I never wrote fiction when my kids were little, because I know writing fiction takes you off into lala land, and you want to be consciously there when your kids are small.

Once you have decided it’s what you’d really like to do in your leisure time, you have to find time for it. More likely, you’ll have to make time for it.

Schedule your day. Set aside fixed writing time. Make sure those kiddies are in bed by eight and no buts (their peace of mind will thank you for that, too – most little kiddies thrive under strict scheduling, but that’s another discussion point), and then write. Don’t fiddle on the internet, write.

Be creative with your time. You spend an hour on public transport every day? Write or plan your writing on the train or bus, so that when you get to your computer later that day, you can crank out the words more efficiently. Forego the office lunch a few times a week so you can write. What spare time is there in your day that you’re not doing anything productive, but which you can turn into writing time?

Phase out peripheral stuff. You’ll probably find that other activities encroach on that important leisure time. Decide which of those activites matter to you. Especially things like TV and computer games can eat up time at some incredible rate. Switch off that damn tv (as for me, we don’t even have tv, and I don’t play computer games, but that’s because they don’t interest me. If you like them, schedule your time).

Decide what’s important. Family time, obviously, but how important is it really that you stand at the sidelines of all your three daughters’ netball matches? Could you perhaps pool with another parent (hint: your partner!). How much do you really gain from participating in the school mum’s gossip circuit? Sure, keep your best friends, but cull some of the others.

Another no-brainer: frankly, I have never visited the house of an interesting person and found it immaculate and spotlessly clean. Interesting people have books, plants, knick-knacks, computers, musical instruments, etc, and they rather use those items than spend time arranging them (dust-free) on shelves. Stop obsessing over housework. Be frank to yourself: who is going to notice the pile of shoes in the hall except you? If the answer is ‘no one I care about’, then the problem is with you.

If you’ve reached the end of this post, and keep wanting to say ‘but…’ and give excuses, then I refer you back to my first point: do you really want to write? Writing takes a lot of time. No ifs, no buts.

This recipe has become a favourite of ours because it’s so quick and easy to make.

Ingredients:

500g chicken fillets (two medium-sized halves)
two tablespoons of green curry paste
can of coconut cream (the lite variety works best because it doesn’t separate)
sprinkle of vegetable oil
large clove of garlic
handful of coriander leaves

Cut chicken in fairly large, even-sized pieces. Fry in oil + green curry paste until the chicken is just white on the outside. Pour in coconut cream, put the lid on the pan and cook until the chicken is done. Add garlic (I prefer it cut in small pieces, not crushed) and chopped-up coriander. Cook a further five minutes.

For some reason we always eat this with broccoli and brown rice.

I’m writing a story about a society that has fertility issues. In fact, fertility-related topics commonly pop up in SF and even in fantasy. One such trope is the notion that some time in the future/on another planet, women will no longer give birth, but that babies will be designed and grown in an artificial environment, or carried by a surrogate. There are many variations on this theme, which range from total artificiality to various types of assisted reproduction. Fertility issues make for interesting material, and can be done very well.

For me, the prize for ‘best fertility technique use’ in fiction goes to Ethan of Athos, a novella in the Miles series by Lois McMaster Bujold. In the world she has created (Athos), there are no women. The men clone eggs from a number of female cultures, fertlise them, and babies are grown artificially.

In C.J. Cherryh’s world, some human colonies produce artificial designer people from scratch. Most of these people are specialist workers. In most of her books, they’re not fertile, so the process of creating them has to be repeated.

In Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh creates a clone from an older woman who has been killed. She treats the subject of cloning very well. A person is shaped by his/her genetic material (which is clone-able) just as much as their environment (which is not clone-able), so clones who are identical are not particularly believable to me. Identical twins are natural clones, and identical twins are never completely identical.

The big question is: why? It’s a question that has to be answered satisfactorily for a book to work. Cloning is high-tech stuff. IVF is high-tech stuff. Creating new people from scratch is high-tech stuff. You are not, ever, going to make me believe that these forms of conception will take over from – ahem – the natural way (which costs nothing), without some pretty good arguments.

Athos doesn’t have women. The Cyteen designer people are infertile (so that their bosses can keep their workforce in hand). In both these worlds, there is plenty of natural breeding going on elsewhere in the universe.

I would buy a world in which a big bad virus makes people infertile and some sort of artificial process became necessary. I would buy that rich people would want, and pay for, designer babies, and that they’d leave the discomfort and pain of pregnancy to a surrogate.

However… I would never buy a world in which all people would become reliant on assisted reproduction.

An analogy – plastic surgery may well become very popular in the near future, but you’ll never get all women to submit to it. Some won’t want it, some simply can’t afford it. If assisted reproduction/designer babies are optional (i.e. women are still fertile), there will always be natural conception. It might be messy, uncomfortable and hurt like hell, but it’s free.

If infertily is a disease: like myxomatosis and rabbits, a virus would make 99.9% of people infertile. With 10 billion people on the planet, 0.1% is still a million fertile people – more than enough for a quick repopulation.

Here’s a blog about a topic that has annoyed me for a long time: the portrayal of scientists and science in fiction.

Some background info: I lived and worked with science types for many years. I married one (until he decided to go into IT). I studied science myself. I did my PhD in one of the University of Sydney’s less glamorous faculties (Agriculture), and spent about four years on campus, after which I worked (yes, my job description was research scientist) for Australia’s national research body (CSIRO) in North Queensland. Our project’s area of expertise was pasture ecology – how the botanical composition of rangelands changes under influence of grazing pressure by animals (domesticated and otherwise). I have also seen the workings of various projects at the University of Queensland, James Cook University (Townsville campus), the Australian Museum and various other museums and research institutions. I’ve been to scientific conferences, heck, helped organise them.

And it pisses me off when fiction portrays science and scientists in a way that shows that the author doesn’t have a fricking clue what sort of people become scientists, and what their daily work involves.

Let’s debunk some myths:

The scruffy unworldly scientist myth
This cliche says that all scientists are somehow careless about their own appearance, detached from the world and a little weird. Yeah, right. Go into an average tea room at any university science department, and you’ll see: 1. people of all ages, 2. people of all races, 3. men and women, 4. few, if any, ‘mad scientist’ types. Honestly, these days working in science involves interacting with lots of people to obtain funding. You can’t do that if you have too much hair growing out of your ears, or if you’re dressing in a 1970’s brown corduroy suit. Go and pull the other one.

The lab
All scientists work in a lab, right?
Actually, they don’t. I hardly ever did, since most of our work was outside, a lot of it fairly physical. Some lines of work do involve labs, sure, but…
Few scientists spend most of their days doing hands-on groundwork. By the time you can call yourself a research scientist, especially if you’re really successful, you’ll be spending your time communicating (going to conferences, giving lectures), writing up papers, meeting with potential funding bodies and the like. Most senior scientists regret having to leave the hands-on work behind, but it’s a necessity. It is their function to provide their project with money, kudos, people, and interesting opportunities. A scientist is not single unit. He/She has a team, sometimes shared between two or more scientists. The team are young university-educated assistants (with degrees in various subjects like lab techniques, computer techniques etc), as well as technicians (who do the organising and a lot of the physical work). A scientist often has students to his/her disposal. These can be undergraduate, postgraduate (Masters or PhD), or postdoc. In other words: a research scientist DOESN’T do lab work, and certainly doesn’t do any work alone.

Aha, but then the scientist must be rich
Yeah, and my name is Santa Claus.
Science is very poorly paid. OK, a leading research scientist has a decent salary, and can afford to live in a decent suburb and have a new car, but being in science is a labour of love, and will never make you rich. Moreover, the type of person who chooses to be a scientist is not someone who is ostentatious in wealth. It’s a gross generalisation of course, but you’ll find most scientists fall within these parameters: unassuming, neat, even-tempered, ’sensible’. They also tend to be non-smoking and non-religious.

So every time I read about a chain-smoking scientist who talks like James Bond, has one-night stands and drives a Ferrari, or the scruffy type who does all his work in his secret lab, I just cringe. It’s painfully obvious that this author has no idea what a scientist does. So now please excuse me while I fling this book across the room…

A NaNoWriMo post, and my personal take on what a first draft should do:

When I start a new book, I open a file, and start writing at random. I pick a scene that inspires me, and when inspiration runs out, I move to another scene. Note how I didn’t say ‘the next scene’? Because the scene can be anywhere, either before or after the one I’ve just written, or maybe even a lot further in the book. Finished? Next scene. There is no order, although eventually I will place the scene in the order in which I think they will go.

If I get stuck and run out of inspiration, I’ll do one of a few things:
- I drop back to a previous scene, and start adding a whole lot of internal monologue to justify why the character did whatever he/she did
- look at the scene balance. Too many talky scenes? I’ll write a shoot-out, or a car chase, or something entirely different. I may not yet know why this happens, and I may not be using the right characters, but I’ll write the scene anyway, because it will form a focus point for earlier parts: this is where the characters have to end up
- I’ll put two characters in a a room and let them talk. Anything goes, but inevitably they’ll start talking about relevant things, and reveal their feelings, and once those feelings become clear, I’ll often realise what I should have done in earlier scenes.
- Write an infodump. Never mind that infodumps are to be avoided, sometimes it really clears the mind to say out loud that so-and-so is such-and-such because of this-and-that.

Right, so by the time I finish, the first draft is a jumble of scenes that may or may not be in the right order, that have far too much internal monologue and other infodumping and that have quite a lot of dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere. But! I know now why my characters are doing things, and what their background is, and I know which parts of plot logica I’m missing. The first draft is for sorting out the character motivations, the plot logic and scene balance, although a first draft will have none of those things.

‘But I don’t know how to review!’

Having been around writer’s workshops a bit, this is one sentiment I’ve heard from new members who are new to commenting on other people’s writing.

To which I say: rubbish.

You’re a reader, right? You like or dislike a story, its characters or its world. You have an opinion, therefore you can write a review.

Because that is what the writer most wants to hear: where did you stumble and which characters held or didn’t hold your interest. Where in the story did you start checking your Email? Most importantly: why? Give simple reasons: the character was too nasty. I didn’t believe so-and-so would do such-and-such. I thought the dialogue was too stilted, and made me laugh where I don’t think that was your intention. I think this story sounds too much like [insert name of book]. Stuff like that. You can keep it brief and general, but tell the author WHY you felt a certain way. There is really nothing to it, and you don’t need a degree in literature.

But what about the nitty-gritty details?

If you feel inclined to comment on style and grammar, again, I’d stick to general impressions:
- The dialogue punctuation isn’t always correct.
- Try to vary sentence length
- Re-word some sentences so they don’t all start with the subject
Stuff like that. You’d have to trust that the author can make his or her own decision about doing something about it and finding help to do so, if they need it. It’s not a good idea to quote writing books/blogs at fellow writers

Don’t waste valuable time rewriting other people’s sentences. A writer isn’t so much interested in people who will re-write their prose, even if only for the simple reason that they write in a certain way and the person rewriting their prose… is another person writing in a different way and the two will never happily coincide. They may say ‘thank you’, but rest assured, if you can’t hear the teeth gnashing in the background, you’re not listening.

It’s good to know what stage the draft is at. First drafts are good for overall plot comments, but at that stage, pointing out typos would be a waste of time. In a final draft, those two would be reversed. If in doubt ask or stick to short comments.

There’s really nothing to it. Give your reaction to the piece. Any reaction will do.

A bit of fun today. What is the best first line you’ve seen in a published book?

I nominate:

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

from John Scalzi Old Man’s War

I opened this in the bookshop and I knew I was SO going to buy that book!