The subjectiveness of writing and reading.

An interesting thought occured to me today whilst answering an email. What happens if an Editor completely misses the point with a piece? If it gets criticised not necessarily because it is a bad ending, but because the Editor misses the point of what the final paragraph is saying? Now you may say that if the Editor doesn't get it then are the general readers likely to get it either? That would be a fair point, but in this case I'm not so sure. I did explain in my reply what the last bit was actually meaning, and it did cross my mind that maybe it was glaringly obvious to me because I had worked in the particular business the story was about for over ten years. Does this knowledge and experience blind me?

On the other hand, I probably ought to add that as the Editor had taken a long time to respond, I had sent the story out to a website that publishes short story. And they liked it a lot. So it is in print because a different Editor did get it. It only goes to show just how subjective writing actually is. It reminds me of a documentary where they interviewed some of the time wasters literary agents who rejected the "Harry Potter" books. Why did they miss out on a licence to print money? My favourite is because they just did not read the manuscript when she sent it to them. Well, their loss. Did they learn? No.

Bringing home the stars

I've finished my new short story, though it won't be going up on the website for a while because magazines like exclusivity for the period that their current issue is running for anything that they publish. That's fair enough. I'm passing it over tomorrow to my resident editor because, like most Authors, I find it very hard to edit my own stuff. Then it will be into the rounds of sending this thing out and trying to find a magazine interested in it. I have three good magazines that I can send it to, although for one of them their hard maximum word limit is only 10,000 words so I will have to lose nearly 1,850 words from the story to make it fit their limit. The other two are more generous and will take up to around 15,000 word stories, so that's okay.

The next story I am going to work on is planned to be a short flash fiction piece of maybe around 1,500 words (you can never really predict with any great accuracy the final word count). It's a hard sci-fi idea I had a few weeks ago, so I thought I would get it out of my system. After that I am toying with a more conventional short story that is just literary fiction highlighting the interactions of native communities with immigrants when they arrive, displaced by war. It will be a genre change for me from what I usually write, but it was such a good idea that I should at least give it a go. It may be though that I ditch it in favour of something else; that happens every once in a while.

I'm pretty pleased that I've written this large short story straight out of the back of writing my novel. If I can keep this pace up I shall be very happy. I still need to get the second draft of my novel done though, so that may come after the flash fiction piece, or even instead of it if the idea doean't work in the end. Only time will tell.

State of the Jenny address.

I suppose I should write an update here. My publisher likes the idea that I can chat and provide 'vaguely witty comment on the World' as some kind of oblique way of selling more books and upping my profile. Well, that's nice.

I suppose there's a mystique to keep up. All writers are supposed to project an aura that the public are supposed to believe. I'd love you all to think that I'm some kind of diva and goddess who spends all their time surrounded by flunkies and bathing in Ass' milk. Well, thankfully I'm not. I'm just another person with a boring day job that isn't quite as boring as a lot of other day jobs that I could have had. I write when I have some spare time, and - shock horror - I write because I just like writing stuff. It's kind of scary to think that some-one somewhere might just read some of the stuff I write, but they do.

It's been a busy old week. Having worked three twelve hour shifts on my three days at work, understandably there hasn't been much time to put fingers to keyboard, but I've done a little. There's a few short stories polished off and sent out to magazines. No doubt, as is usual these days, more than 90% of all I send out will be rejected. There's nothing new in this. It is an unfoirtunate fact that the biggest bunch of timewasters short of lawyers (sorry Zoë), politicians and estate agents are literary agents. The number of times a piece gets sent back rejected not because it isn't any good but because the workshy timewaster whose desk it landed on couldn't be bothered to even read it is beyond count. But it isn't just me. Even the greatest writers have suffwered such rejections throughout their career. Joanne Rowling, Enid Blyton and Stephen King are the three who readily spring to mind. It's nothing personal, just the unfortunate way that the publishing industry works.

The other two days in the week were spent in Durham. I had to go up there to pick up some wedding dresses. Long story - in essence if you see the dress that bowls you over, don't waste your time forever searching in lots of other bridal shops. Follow your heart and just go with the one that bowled you over. That meant that thursday and friday were taken. So that just leaves today for writing. Well, it is going well. The short story with no name is reaching completion. Hopefully it might be able to be passed over to be edited by the end of today, or maybe tomorrow at the latest. Good news I feel. I really ought to think of a title for it. It's sci-fi horror, as I'm sure that I mentioned before. I must have a think about it.

As a final oblique thought, I filled my car with petrol yesterday. Now, I don't usually do a huge mileage any more. In fact I usually only fill the car up once a month, and even then it is rarely less than half full. The trip to Durham used a reasonable amount and I am horrified to find that ten gallons now costs over fifty pounds. What kind of daylight robbery is this? Especially as much more than half gets thieved off as various taxes to be frittered by the government. Where is the good public transport alternative we were promised? No sign of it materialising around here.

Harumph.

How do you shit some-one's pants effectively with the written word?

The title says it all really. I'm writing horror seriously for the first time ever. Okay, it's sci-fi horror, but it is still a new venture to me. It's been born partly out of an idea I had many years ago long before my first book was published. I had an idea for a creature that was very scary, developed with the idea that monsters that you either see or that resemble a man in a rubber suit suck big time. I wanted to get away from the lame monsters of Hollywood horror. Well, in writing my new short story this idea came home to roost blended with a second idea I had that came from a Mary Celeste themed dream.

Of course, even if an idea is good, you still have to keep the reader guessing and not 'show the monster' too much or too soon, as Zoë often puts it whilst lamenting the questionable quality of some of the Russell Davies era Dr Who. So I've already had to rewrite a couple of bits to build the suspense, but I think I've got there. Part of the best way to scare people is to leave them expecting something of a horror nature, then sprinkle in a few false turns. I've done that a couple of times, and building their horror level each time. I've just written one mscene now that reveals the after effects of the 'monster' without specifically drawing attention to the monster. I think I've succeeded. At any rate, it has upped the ante and progressed the mystery of the story along to a new level.

I'm very minded of the fact that I have only around 10,000 words to play with, plus or minus ten percednt, so I have to be very economical with what I write. That all goes back to what I talked about in my last blog post. I think I can do it though. It is certainly slow going though, not helped in part by working hard on other non-writing stuff, and this being a new venture for me.

I have another longish short story to be edited and I'm hoping to get this sent to Asimovs in America some time during this week. I'm also aiming for this sci-fi horror story to be done and ready for editing by the end of this week too. Then my next project will be a short fiction piece provisionally called "The longest Summer" though don't quote me on that title. I have a flash fiction idea too called "The walls have ears" that will probably be a flash fiction (approximately 1,500 word) piece. We shall see what this week and next week brings, but I am starting to really get my writing output pushed up.

Less is more

Writing is a curious business. Short stories are harder to write than books, a lot of the time. You see, if you have the ability to write and getting the words on the page is not a problem then a book is just so much easier to write than something a lot shorter. 80,000 words plus gives you a lot of room for development. You can explore interesting ideas that suggest themselves during the writing and develop all your charectors and ideas very effctively.

In short stories you do not have that luxury. Short stories quickly become long stories if you start developing sub-plots, and that is bad if a short story is what you are after.

Keeping everything within 10,000 words can be quite a challenge, expecially as a short story still has to have a beginning, middle and end and draw the reader in. However 10,000 words is still not as tough as flash fiction or micro fiction. Flash fiction is around 1,500 words, and that can be very tough indeed. It has to tell a story to completion, draw the reader in and yet has very limited words to do it in. It is only a certain type of story that would be any good to work at this kind of short length. Flash fiction, of around 150 words is much harder still. 150 words is not much at all, and I've only ever managed one piece of micro fiction this short. I have to say it is a length that I don't like at all. Quite apart from being the most difficult to write well, the results always feel like the Banana Republic of writing. They're a con; so short they leave the reader wondering why there is no more.

Books are always going to be my favourite to write. I just like developing ideas and constructing intricate worlds. I think the fact that I've had five published, with at lweast one more done and on the way plus several others that were discarded after being finished. Some people might baulk at the idea of writing something so massive as a book, but I tell you that it is so much easier than a short story. If you can develop ideas and get the words out on the page, a book will always be the easier to write. After all, if you struggle to get more than a few words together before you run out of puff and inspiration, then you need a lot more practice at being a writer. Because practice is the key to everything.

Nothing dates faster than the future

Sci-fi set in space can be a difficult thing to write. Let's get one thing straight: all sci-fi, no matter how convincing it may seem, has to be made up. That means everything you see from a Star Trek episode to a copy of 'Rendezvous with Rama' had to be made up. It is a cunning mind that can create a convincing world that seems totally plausible yet is not real.

Of course, sci-fi has been around since at least the nineteenth century. Possibly something similar existed before this, but that was when it got its official genre title. That means that almost everything now is influenced by something else; it is almost impossible to come up with something that isn't a reinterpretation or a retelling of at least one aspect of something that has gone before. That's not to say that sci-fi is plagurism, because it is not. But it is very hard to get a truly original idea when imaginations have been hard at work for nearly 200 years at least.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the future was done with miniskirts, bakofoil and robots with personality disorders the size of a car. Computers were huge and strangely required spinning tape reels on the front, despite this being the future, aparently. Sci-fi is always influenced by the real world of the time it is written. Nothing dates quicker than a vision of the future, which is why sci-fi has quite a limited lifespan, especially hard sci-fi. The real trick in writing sci-fi is in recognising what might be the future and what certainly will not be the future. Also, think big. History shows that if a piece of technology is good it will catch on, spread like bacteria, and get smaller with more functions very quickly.

It is one of the important things I strive to in my writing that the future, that things are believable and not overly influenced by the real world at the precise moment that I am writing. Of course I have failed at times. There are books I wrote over ten years ago that have never been published that when I look over the manuscript I shudder and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Most sci-fi from the 50s, 60s and 70s is now truly unreadable, even some of the ones that were considered classics. Some books are champions of the greatest sci-fi and will live forever. 'Rendezvous with Rama' by Arthur C. Clarke is certainly one of these. However even Mr Clarke is not immune to the dated sucky bakofoil version of the future phenomina as 'A fall of moondust' shows. Philip K. Dick had some wonderful ideas, but occasionally was thwarted by ideas whose expression dated not so well. I love 'Flow my tears, the policeman said' but 'Time out of joint' is not one of my favourites.

So I hope my writing might come at least in a small way closer to the good stuff. I shall promise to not have my charectors wear bakofoil, dress like 1960s fashion rejects or fire phasers/lasers/disrupters/flange guns at Aliens from the planet ZZxpter 9 who mysteriously look like other humans in rubber suits.

As a final unrelated thought, did you ever see a bathroom on the Enterprise? Does anyone ever go to the bog on that thing?

le sigh

Well, it finally happened. In my currewnt short story, I've sort have started going metric. I never will fully, and resented the undemocratic attempts of an unelected unaccountable group of faceless beaurocrats in another country, aided and abetted by a group of faceless idiots in the UK government and civil service to make illegal my culture and free will to use whatever system of measurement I chose. I actually find imperial easier to understand, for a variety of reasons that explain why imperial came to exist over hundreds of years of refinement.

That's by-the-by now. I've used the measurement of metres per second for the first time, because metric is, at least, the measurement system of physics. So be it. I suppose it would have come eventually. Call me stubborn, but it would have come a whole lot quicker if I hadn't had undemocratic beaurocrats who most people alive and of voting age today never got a say on trying to make imperial measurements illegal to use. When there is so much serious crime in the World, what kind of a bunch of cretins instead ignore solving and prosecuting real crimes but instead hound a grocer in sunderland because he sold apples in pounds and ounces at the request of his customers who wanted to buy them that way because it was easier for them to understand?