Category Archives: Process

Zen and the Art of Beating Your Head Against the Wall – Once More, With Rejections

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I want to talk about rejections for a minute. Yes, no one likes them, but as the Corleones would say, “It’s nothing personal. Just business.” For the most part that’s actually true, though this being the small and feud-oriented family field that it is, it’s not always true, but close enough for the sake of this discussion.

The idea that it’s “not personal” flies in the face of the idea of the “personal” rejection, the one step up from the universally hated “form” rejection. A personal rejection is often interpreted to mean that you’re making progress. Often true, especially when you’re just starting out. Say you’ve gotten ten form rejects in a row from the same editor, but the eleventh gets a “try again” scribble(okay, these days maybe it’s a personal note tacked onto the end of a form macro, but the point stands), and the fourteenth gets an actual note explaining why the editor isn’t buying this one, but also (as before) try again. As Mike Resnick often says, the key word in “personal rejection” is not “personal,” and he’s right. “No” is still not a “yes.” Even so, personal rejections, while considerably short of a sale, are often rightly seen as encouraging signs.

Yet what I’m going to talk about is an exception to that rule. A case where the quite understandable response to a personal rejection would be to never, ever, bother to send that editor another story or novel so long as you both shall live. I’m not talking about the unprofessional, insulting rejection; so long as you’re dealing with people who conduct themselves professionally, those are rare, and why would you deal with anyone else? No, what I’m talking about is far more common type of personal rejection. I’ve gotten a few, and they never fail to send me into a funk of annoyance and regret.

It’s simply this: a rejection that shows beyond question that the aspects of your work that make it unique to you, plays to your strengths and interests, and that may even make your work worth doing to you, to go through the agony and sweat to get the story down in the first place, are the very aspects that the editor finds objectionable. In short, the editor clearly doesn’t “get” you. But there’s a catch to it, and one rejection like that doesn’t tell the story. You have to subject yourself to multiple instances of the same sort of cluelessness before you’re justified in writing off the market completely.

I can hear it now–“I do? What do you think I am, some kind of masochist?” Continue reading →

Apropos of Not Much

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This is the jacket copy from my first novel, The Long Look. Why? Because I always liked it. And just because.

“Everything you know about evil magicians is wrong.

Tymon the Black is the latest in a long succession of magicians to suffer under a curse called “The Long Look.” He gets glimpses of future horrors, horrors that will almost certainly come to pass unless he acts. When one such glimpse prods him to arrange for the murder of a headstrong young prince, he sets a cascading chain of events in motion that could lead to a future even more terrible than the one he tried to prevent.

Now all he has to do is hang on to a friend, train an apprentice, prevent a prince obsessed with revenge from destroying himself and his entire kingdom, help a princess come to terms with guilt and grief, make sure a wedding happens, make sure a war doesn’t, and send a creature of ultimate darkness back to the void from whence it came.

All in a day’s work for the world’s most evil wizard? Not quite. There’s also a goddess to contend with, and there’s nothing like attracting the interest of a goddess to upset the balance of any evil scheme. No matter. No one ever said that the life of a fiend was an easy one.

THE LONG LOOK is a fantasy novel with a unique blend of action, introspection, speculation and humor that should keep any reader both involved and confused, but don’t worry. It all makes sense. Eventually.”

Proof, If Any Was Needed, That I Just Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone

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Those who have been following this blog know that I’m a beginning guitar player. Very beginning, and a slow learner (ask me how long I’d been writing before I was selling regularly, if you want proof). But that aside, I’m also still working out what sort of guitar I want to play. Do I, will I have a preference? Les Paul? Stratocaster? Both? Something else entirely? Right now I’m in the experimental phase. My first guitar was and is an Epiphone Les Paul Special II, which I still think was a smart choice for a beginner’s electric guitar. The controls are relatively simple and it sounds great except when it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t I know it’s me and not the guitar. No excuses.

Yet I admit I’m Stratocaster curious (Let’s face it—like the Les Paul, the Fender strat is iconic), so when this pawn shop special showed up on an online auction, I bid low. And won, somewhat to my own surprise. That’s the first photo. It’s an entry-level Squier Affinity Stratocaster, made in 1999 in Taiwan (Squier is to Fender as Epiphone is to Gibson, sort of). The resolution of that photo is such that you really can’t tell, but believe me, that guitar was pretty beat up. Playable, but just barely. One of the tone controls was out, all switches were “scratchy” from accumulated dust and crud and three of the machine heads (tuning pegs) were shot. You could tune it, but it wouldn’t stay tuned for very long or sound very good even when it was tuned.

So what went through my mind? Aside from “WTF was I thinking?” I mean. Sure, I hadn’t paid much for it (to put it mildly), so the smart thing would have been to cut my losses. Riight. I went straight to “I can fix this!” but wasn’t content to stop there, oh no. I proceeded right along to– “I can make it better!” The tone controls weren’t really a problem; I found a broken solder joint on a capacitor that would have been an easy fix. I used to make up serial cables for our old mini-computer system, so I’m not afraid of a little soldering. But the pickguard was flimsy white plastic, the pickups (what feeds the sound from the strings to the amp, if you didn’t know) were low-end and cheap even when they were new. So if its immediate problems were corrected, the guitar still just wasn’t good enough. But it could be. Continue reading →

Just What the (Bleep) Do I Think I’m Doing? – Redux

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“I never plan things. I start writing them, and it’s like a magician forces a card on me. ‘Pick a card!’ I couldn’t start it if I knew what I was going to do.” – William Gibson

I’ve said it before in a slightly different context, but now it’s time to explore the idea to its logical conclusion. So repeat after me: “I’m a writer. And I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

I’ve talked about “foxes and hedgehogs” to compare and contrast different approaches to writing. Today I want to talk about different approaches to process. Specifically: how do you begin? As with the whole fox/hedgehog metaphor there are no absolutes, but there is a spectrum, and we tend to gravitate toward one end or the other. In short, to begin a project we either tend toward Order or Chaos. Continue reading →

Sparing Your Darlings

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“Murdering Your Darlings.” Yesterday the subject came up in the context of cutting good material that nevertheless no longer belonged in the story you’re working on. That is, the case of a paragraph or page of chapter which is well-written, interesting in its own right, perhaps even particularly fine, but neither advances the plot nor reveals character. In other words, it’s just not pulling its weight, therefore it’s adding weight and slowing your story down. It has to go. That’s often the sense in which that phrase is used today, but it occurs to me that, originally, the phrase meant something a little different.

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly— and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. ”  — Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

“Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” — Samuel Johnson

The rationale hasn’t really changed; the premise is that the material just doesn’t belong. Yet the subtext is that the material doesn’t belong in your story for the sole reason that it is especially fine. That is, the passage calls attention to itself rather than serving the story, and at that point it no longer belongs. There’s truth in that. For a story to work the voice and tone need to be consistent, or at least in some sort of harmony.  A passage that is so clearly out of place can jolt the reader out of the story, remind them that they’re reading and not really experiencing, and the risk is that the whole structure then collapses like the construct of shadows and mist and mirrors that it actually is.

So you murder your darlings. It’s good, tried and true advice…so far as it goes. I’m going to be a teensy bit contrarian here, and suggest that, like all advice–good or otherwise–sometimes it’s just full of crap. Continue reading →