OMG, I thought we’d seen the end of this sort of silliness.

When I first started looking for markets for my work in 2005, it was not uncommon at all to find in the submission guidelines for a magazine or agent the line that works written in first person would not be considered. Thankfully, that prejudice has disappeared, thanks to some excellent books written in first person. Well – almost. Some people still insist that all their submissions have to be in third person (and past tense, too).

Exactly what it is that Haters Of Things hate about first person, I’ve never been able to understand, except perhaps that it’s different, and Haters Of Things hate ‘different’. Literature is made of ‘different’. Sometimes, writers use ‘different’ to prove a point. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But is this a reason to blanket-reject anything that attempts to put a fresh face on narrative voice?

Please, go and pull the other one.

To be contrary, I wrote a flash story in second person future tense, just to prove I could.

Anyway, I’m glad to report that first person is no longer ‘different’, thanks to popular books like Hunger Games, which, incidentally, is written in present tense as well, another form of writing Haters Of Things tend to hate.

Honestly, people, open your mind to new styles when reading.

*No, I’m not a great fan of Tim Winton’s quote-mark-less dialogue either, for the simple reason that it’s hard to figure where the dialogue starts and where it stops, but eventually you get used to it, and then it’s almost like reading a ‘normal’ book, so in the end, my judgement about this could be summed up in ‘I don’t mind’.

One of the features of reading through slush is to be faced with writers’ blatant disregard for punctuation. Really, dudes, want to make a good impression? Learn to punctuate properly, with special attention to dialogue, and special attention to semicolons. I don’t know. What is it with semicolons that makes writers fall in love with them, load them into a blunderbuss and fire them at random at their manuscripts? Does it make them feel learned? Do they think readers will sit up and take notice and think: aha! This writer uses the nebulous punctuation device that is the semicolon, and that neither of us understands, and thus writer must be good? As I said, I don’t know, but the poor semicolon is much-abused, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness.

So here are two simple truths about semicolons, and they are all you need to know about them:

The best and most fail-safe way to use a semicolon is…

… not at all.

That’s right. Written language doesn’t need semicolons. At all. So if you’re unsure of their use, just don’t use them. Simple. And, by the way, semicolon-peppered manuscripts are very -uhm – amateurish anyway, so just ease off on them, right? No more than 2 per chapter/story is probably a good guideline.

… if you are determined to have semicolons, here’s another easy rule: a semicolon is interchangeable with a full stop, and NOT with a comma. Also easy to remember. If, however, you are of the variety unsure about the placement of full stops vs commas, then, well, maybe you just need to brush up on punctuation in general, and it’s probably best to forget about the semicolon altogether. You don’t need it, and if your punctuation skills are not the best, chances are that the humble semicolon will just get you into a whole lot of unnecessary trouble.

A while ago, I asked Dan Holloway, indie publisher and advocate of the self-publishing model to comment on the advisability of self-publishing.

Since that post, I get regular visits to this blog from people who have searched for the exact question that is the title of this post.

Should I self-publish?

I can almost unequivocally say that if you’ve reached this post by searching for those words on Google, and your book is fiction, and not of the variety that you just want to pass around your immediate family, then the answer should be an equally unequivocal: NO.

No, you should not self-publish fiction, unless one or more of these things apply (the more, the better):

- you have a ready-made audience of at least a few hundred people. This could come through your gaming or fan fiction contacts, or your long-term presence as a member of a community of fiction writers. It doesn’t matter. You need this audience.
- You know how the book trade works.
- you are re-publishing a collection of stories that have already been published, and for which you know there is an audience. Ditto if you’re self-publishing to keep older books to which you own the rights in print.
- you have serious credentials as writer, so your name attracts buyers. You’ve published books with big publishers, or you’ve sold stories to respected magazines.
- you understand that paying a copy-editor to go through your work does NOT qualify as ‘the book has been edited’. Books will need copy-editing, sure, but more important than that, a book will need editing on a larger scale for flow, tension and continuity. You can NOT do this yourself. You can NOT ask a friend or your crit group to do this. This is one part where it really pays to get someone who knows the market and knows books. These people are expensive, very much so. Don’t skimp on this part of the process. Yet none of the self-published books I’ve read have gone through large-scale editing by a professional editor. It shows. It really does. As a result, a lot of sub-standard fiction gets published. You have a book you’ve worked on for long hours. Do you really want to add to this unsorted slush pile?

I’d like to talk about something positive. All this don’t this and don’t that talk gets me down. As I said often, there are no rules in writing, only guidelines, so they might as well be positive ones, like this:

You feel you are in the hands of a competent writer from the word go when that writer…

… uses precise and to-the-point language…

… which includes:

- using words a reader can picture
For example, I can’t picture ‘furniture’ in a room or ‘clothes’ on a washing line as well as I can picture ‘a table and four chairs’ or ‘overalls’ in the same sentence. Moreover, a more detailed word can add to setting. A character who has overalls on their washing line is going to be a very different person from the one who has massive floral bloomers on their washing line.

- minimising the use of the two ‘weak’ pronouns: ‘it’ or ‘they’
It is possible to kill a piece of writing with overuse of these words. Make sure that when you use it or they, there is a very clear noun for these words to refer to in the previous sentence. People tend to use ‘it’ a lot in speech, but two speakers frequently have connection that goes beyond dialogue. If my husband comes into the room after he’s stomped about the house for a bit, I already know what he’s looking for without him having said a single thing. He hasn’t picked up the home phone to ring his mobile number, so it isn’t his phone. He hasn’t asked me for the car keys, so it’s not his keys. Ergo: his glasses. Don’t assume readers have a similar connection with you or your characters. Readers need to be told.
For the sake of this argument, I suggest you get one of the Harry Potter books off the shelf. Notice that the author rarely ever uses the word ‘they’ when referring to a group of people doing something? ‘They’ means nothing. It’s imprecise and allows the reader to forget who was there.

Use precise language and you’re ahead of the pack.

… put in a seperate post, because it gets confusing when you mix up subjects in blog posts. On second thoughts, cross-posted from my personal blog.

A while ago, everyone was discussing the boundaries between Science Fiction and Fantasy. I don’t know that anyone got a satisfactory answer out of the discussion, but just recently, I was wondering: what is the boundary between *some* space opera and hard SF?

Where does hard SF stop being hard SF and become something else?

Any opinions?

A lot is being said in the Twitterverse about the subject of writer publicity and promotion. How to build an author platform, how to promote your book, blah, blah, blah.

For one, I find it terribly annoying to be constantly peppered with requests from people to become a fan of their unpublished selves, or their unpublished novels on Facebook. I find it equally annoying to follow an author’s blog or twitter account or whatever when all they do is promote their own material.

Promotion is not as cheap as all that.

If you want people to follow your blog, you should make interesting posts. The subject is not terribly relevant, but it can’t be constantly about new books you have coming out, or, even more annoying, raving reviews your work has received.

A blog offers your readers (whether you’re published or not) an insight into whatever aspect of your life you choose to share. This could be writing technicalities, as done by Ilona Andrews. It could be tv, movies and aspects of society (or your cats) as done in the very entertaining blog of John Scalzi. There are excellent blogs by writers as yet unpublished, such as the services and quizzes for writers by John Gibbs.

The point is, if you want people to follow you in the blogosphere, you have to give them content. Advertising is not content.

I’ve been writing a lot of short fiction recently. Quite a few writers do this, and the saying goes that a writer’s output of short fiction goes down markedly once the writer sells a novel. Some writers never write any short fiction at all. I think, though, that you can learn from writing short fiction, and some lessons come from unexpected angles.

Here is what I’ve learned from writing short fiction:

1. A couple of short stories make a novel. Well, not literally, not unedited, but writing short stories allow you to explore story ideas and build background information for a novel.

2. Short stories allow you to experiment with different techniques and styles before committing yourself to a longer piece. This also shows you the importance of finding the right voice for the main character, and the fact that this is probably more important than your personal voice as a writer.

3. Short stories are just like novels, but only shorter. Yeah – duh, that’s rocket science. What I mean is that you can use the same techniques. Since I’ve been writing short stories, I have a lot more novel drafts where, when I hit a spot that’s hard, I simply skip it and write something later in the story. I started doing this in short stories and found it an easier way to write. I work on my drafts by nibbling away at it a sentence at a time in a whole number of scenes at the same time.

4. One big difference: short stories often end up going into the world much more polished, simply because there’s not as many words to pore over again and again. Yes, I get that we should send all our work out at polished as possible, but the reality is that a 5000-word story gets a lot more attention per word than a 100,000-word novel. What is the lesson for novels in this? Getting things right the first time. Because short story editing attunes your brain to style issues (such as word repetition), you simply don’t make the mistakes as often in first drafts.

What have you learned while writing short stories?

There have been some noises recently about writers blaming magazine editors for their failure to get published. Apparently, in case you didnt know this yet, and notice my tongue is firmly in cheek, there is a conspiracy that prevents new writers from getting published. On a more serious note, fellow ex-OWW-er Ann Leckie discussed coping mechanisms for writers who suffer lots of rejections and not much success. For obvious reasons, she suggested that lashing out at editors on a public site is probably a bad idea.

I’ve thought about these coping mechanisms, and one of them is the cocoon.

Let me explain.

Do you have a tight-knit group of writers who first joined XX workshop about the same time you did? Do you always/mostly read their work and give them supportive commentary? Do you as a group band together when someone, mostly someone who hasn’t been at the site/workshop for as long as you have, and ‘obviously’ doesn’t know the ‘rules’, gives any of your group an ‘unnecessarily’ harsh review? Do you all agree and chime in that this person is an idiot and excessively rude to boot, and none of you will ever return their reviews?

If you’ve answered yes to most of these questions, then you have a cocoon, a place where you can slip after your confidence has taken a beating, and where everyone will confirm that yes, you are a good writer, and the world out there is just full of idiots.

Cocoons are very useful. Often, these people will be your friends for much of your writing career. They give you safety, and a place to run where you can be sure that people are nice to you. That’s fine, but they’re a coping mechanism, and it’s good to realise what’s happening.

To make progress in your writing, there comes a time you must step outside the cocoon and face the harsh world. Keep the cocoon and take shelter when life is temporarily too hard, but don’t confuse your cocoon with the general readership, or with possible reactions from agents and publishers.

I have to admit to a partiality to recipes that involve putting something in the oven and forgetting about it for at least an hour. Here is another such recipe. This recipe came from my brother, who adapted it from a recipe in a Jamie Oliver book.

Ingredients:
For the number of people you plan to feed, take:
chicken legs
potatoes, unpeeled, cut in quarters
tomatoes, cut in quarters

To season:
Fresh basil
Garlic cloves (at least 4-5) cut in large chunks
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
*

Combine and mix all ingredients and arrange in an oven dish big enough for all ingredients to be spread in a single layer. Cook at 180C for an hour and a half.
That’s it!

* The original recipe calls for a red chilli, but I forgot to buy them, and the kids don’t like spicy food all that much, so I made it without. Tastes fine just the same.

With thanks to RJ for inspiration

Does your writing suffer from thesaurus-itis?

You know, you’ve gotten over the adverb-and-adjective stage of writing, and someone in a writing group says ‘you should use more interesting verbs’ and ‘you use were/was too much’.

You look at your writing and you think OMG, they’re right. So you jump at the thesaurus. And out come the interesting verbs. Perched, loomed, slanted, seeped, percolated, dissipated, etc etc.

OK, hold the thesaurus and consider the following:

The only thing worse than a piece of text in which the words were/was occur at least once every sentence (and more frequently than that) is a piece of text in which they don’t occur at all.

I use the 50% rule: use a different verb instead of were/was 50% of the time, and no one will squeak about overuse or twisted language.

While castles can happily perch on rocky outcrops, and trees are perfectly OK to loom over small cottages, before you commit to a word you’ve found in the thesaurus, consider whether or not it might, just might, sound far-fetched and ridiculous.

If in doubt, use a simple verb.

Actually, just use the simple verb, and save the more complicated one for a situation where you want to draw attention to a piece of text.

Too many crafty verbs (or nouns for that matter) = eye-bleed.