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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Going to the Nebulas

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Going to the Nebulas

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Nebula Awards Weekend 2016-smallSo I’ve been falling down on my blogging duties the last few weeks, but as the title of my blog maybe tells you, I’m a teacher before I’m a blogger. It’s the end of the semester and I’ve been teaching two classes, a directed studies (think independent study but with weekly meetings), and advising Myth-Ink, the Columbia College – Chicago student science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing club.

I require the students in the more advanced course, the Fantasy Writing Workshop, to complete at least one story and submit it to a semi-pro or pro market. But the course aimed at writing majors and non-writing majors alike, Exploring Fantasy Genre Writing, has more than half the students ready to submit a poem or short story for publication, as well. There’s always a few, each semester, but more this semester, I think.

So we’ve been doing a lot of copy-editing and proofing exercises, reviewing manuscript submission format, learning how to find appropriate markets, reviewing market guidelines, learning what and what not to put into a cover letter, walking them through writing their first author bio, and talking about what scares them about submitting. I’ve gotten the feeling that the last one is maybe the most important one of all. I’m going to have to think on that.

As part of the last week of classes, for both my courses, I’m having a representative from our department’s Publishing Lab (run by students, for students, to help them submit their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction) come in. They help read proposed cover letters, find markets, and provide emotional support. The drill is this, with their laptops open and everyone tapped in to the school wi-fi, when a student author says they’re ready to submit, their finger hovering over the send button, the group does a mission-control countdown from five.

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One More Time(Piece)

One More Time(Piece)

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Robinson Kill EditorIn my last post I talked about John D. MacDonald’s The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything, and today I’d like to take a look at Spider Robinson’s homage to that classic story, Kill the Editor.

I should begin by telling you that Kill the Editor was published separately as a limited edition (1991) but also appears as the first two thirds of his longer Lady Slings the Booze (1992), which is in itself a follow-up (avoiding the dreaded “s” word) to Callahan’s Lady. In Lady Slings Robinson tips his hat to several other mystery/crime writers in his acknowledgements, but it’s MacDonald’s watch that interests me here.

As you’ll recall if you read my last post, Kirby Winter inherited a watch that would stop time for the person holding it. A ton of other people wanted to get his secret from him – most without knowing exactly what the secret was – and defending himself and defeating the bad guys constitutes the plot of that story. (Or the plot of pretty much any story, I suppose.)

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The Girl The Gold Watch And Everything

The Girl The Gold Watch And Everything

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MacDonald Gold Watch1John D. MacDonald is one of my favourite crime writers, and he’s probably best known for his Travis McGee series, starting with The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964) and ending with The Lonely Silver Rain (1985). Others, such as Glen Cook,  have used this device after him, but I’m fairly certain that MacDonald’s the first person who identified individual books in his series by giving each one a title colour.

While John D. is well worth looking into for any of his genre or non-genre novels, I’d like to draw your attention in particular to his only SF contribution, The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything.

In this story a mild-mannered young man, Kirby Winter, inherits from his uncle a watch that will stop time for everyone except the person holding it. Of course Uncle Omar used the watch to make himself rich, but he also did a lot of good. He tried to keep as low a profile as possible, but unscrupulous types figured out he had something that gave him a edge in the money world, and now they’re after Kirby to get whatever it is for themselves. That’s the essential problem and conflict of the novel, and with the help of Bonnie Lee Beaumont, a young woman who happens to be a good deal quicker off the mark and savvy about the world than Kirby is, the problem gets solved.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Tony Hillerman

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Tony Hillerman

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My all-time favorite coffee table book
My all-time favorite coffee table book

Last week, I wrote about John Cleese’s Elementary, My Dear Watson. I’m struggling through my re-watch of his The Strange Case of The End of Civilization as We Know It (I thought it was bad on first viewing: nothing has changed my mind this time around), so that isn’t ready to go yet. So, here’s the first of several posts related to a Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster: the late Tony Hillerman.

“I was writing episodically because this short book stretched about three years from 1967 to 1970 from first paragraph to final revision – with progress frequently interrupted by periods of sanity – probably induced by fatigue and sleepiness. Most of my efforts at fiction were done after dinner when the kids were abed, papers were graded and the telephone wasn’t ringing.

Sometimes, in those dark hours, I would realize that the scene I finished was bad, the story wasn’t moving, the book would never be published, and I couldn’t afford wasting time I could be using to write nonfiction people would buy.

Then I would pull the paper from the typewriter (remember those?), put the manuscript back in the box, and the box on the shelf to sit for days, or some times a week, until job stress eased and the urge to tell the story returned.”

So did Tony Hillerman, decorated World War II combat veteran, former newspaper reporter and then-current university teacher, very slowly, write The Blessing Way. Hillerman is not a Navajo. He’s a Caucasian who grew up in a small Oklahoma village on land belonging to the Potawatomi tribe. He went to the local Indian school for first through eighth grade and from an early age had no prejudices against Indians. They were just kids, like him. It shaped the character that let him write about the Navajos in a realistic and sympathetic manner. They aren’t simply stereotypes in a mystery book.

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Sci-ficionados: Our Insatiable Hunger for Stories, and What it Means for the Human Race

Sci-ficionados: Our Insatiable Hunger for Stories, and What it Means for the Human Race

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third eyeFans of science fiction and fantasy tend to have an innate curiosity, one that is not sated simply by day-to-day life and the world as it is. They cannot content themselves with the rote script written for them.

There are people all around who are content simply to go to school, get a job, have a family, raise kids to follow the same formula, retire. And some of these people are well informed — they read the news to see what’s going on. They have hobbies. They like to be entertained — they watch sitcoms to have a laugh at the status quo. They may even watch some of those movies with zombies and giant robots and superheroes to let a little bit of their imagination off the leash: what if this predictable old world were shaken up by something like that?

But the real sci-ficionados, they aren’t content with an occasional, half-winking excursion into the game of what-if before settling back down onto the landing pad of Reality. Because they recognize, deep down, that this is not the only possible world, and that this so-called reality is also utterly strange. They want to know about nano-tech and parasites and the Inquisition and how and why homo sapiens developed a larger prefrontal cortex and what the hell are dreams anyway? And a hundred, a thousand, a million other things. Why is this society the way it is, and is it foreordained that we must follow this script?

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: “Head-Hopper” – A Correction and a New Example

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: “Head-Hopper” – A Correction and a New Example

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coral povThis is part 9 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

After I turned in my blog last week, I met my husband at a blues club. I do a lot of writing, and thinking about writing, while listening to live music.

For years I have been using my story “What’s With All the Damned Zombies, Anyway?” to explain to my students the Head-Hopper point of view. Years. Just as I did in last week’s blog. And it dawned on me, in the middle of one of Pistol Pete’s guitar solos, that I was wrong.

That isn’t a true example of Head-Hopper. That’s an example of Mixed POVs: it has Serial POV segments which are strung together using Folksy Narrator (next blog) interludes.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on “Head-Hopper”

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on “Head-Hopper”

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lighthouse

This is part 8 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, does a brilliant job with our next POV style:

  1. Head-Hopper

If you’ve not read her novel, I urge you to do so. I also urge you to read it aloud, even if you’re sitting outside at a café, which I did a few summers ago. The book is graced with many long, complex sentences that loop and flow, and sometimes change point of view from one clause to the next. Reading it out loud helps the brain make sense of the phrases and clauses in a way that eyes-only reading can’t manage as well. When done well, as Ms. Woolf did, it is a brilliant writing stratagem. But it works best in stories where there is very little physical plot. The conflict comes mainly from the contrast of how different characters perceive the same moment, and in the shifting emotions of characters.

Which means, generally, it is not a good point of view choice for action-packed genre stories.

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How to Worldbuild a Good Sandbox: Four Rules from the Warhammer 40K Universe

How to Worldbuild a Good Sandbox: Four Rules from the Warhammer 40K Universe

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Honour Guard Dan Abnett-small
Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K universe is one of the best sandboxes around.

I’m working on a sandbox Space Opera setting.

Sandbox is the tricky part; a “sandbox” is a storyworld that lets you tell (or experience — if you are a gamer) all sorts of different kinds of story. Essentially, I’m building my Discworld.

Oh, you say, just make it big with lots of different kinds of settings plus spare blank spots on the map.

Yes, that gives you lots of flexibility (though less than you’d think). However, the stories won’t be — sorry, I can’t think of a better word — branded.

I mean, the asteroid miners over here and the fight against the dark lord over there, don’t need to belong in the same universe and the reader (or player) won’t really feel as if they are revisiting the same place.

So a good sandbox is one that maximises the possible range of branded stories.

Spend time with a 12-year-old tabletop gamer and you quickly realize that — in this light — Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K universe is one of the best sandboxes around. You can could dump just about any Space Opera SF story into it, and it would still feel like 40K. To do Firefly, just plug in Orcs, Inquisitors and Space Marines and Imperial Guards. To do Starship Troopers tell a story about the Imperial Guard. To do Star Trek, just follow a Tau captain on their five year mission.

Less so in the Star Wars universe.

Firefly Wars would need a local civil war as backstory, since the cleanup after the prequels feels like it would involve more mass graves. Your Alliance could be the Empire, but the Empire doesn’t really feel as if it would do dark secrets — why bother hiding them? — or have secret super soldier programs– it has Stormtroopers and Sith anyway. Starship Troopers could be about the latter-day Stormtroopers, but the moral ambiguity would be lost. Star Trek…? No, not without taking a ship to a different galaxy and then it would not feel like Star Wars. It would lose its brand.

So the 40K ‘verse is a far better sandbox than the Star Wars one.  How can this be? It appears to follow four basic rules…

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Meeting Your Heroes

Meeting Your Heroes

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Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee

There is a saying that you should never meet your heroes. The golden god may have feet of clay, and all that. I don’t agree.

Now, I adore my wife. Let me make that plain up front, so there are no misunderstandings. But there is another woman in my life – my goddess of writing, Tanith Lee.

Tanith Lee is the reason I’m a writer today. She inspired me in a way that nothing and no one else did or could. I’ve always hoped that if I worked hard enough and long enough I might one day be a tenth as good a writer as she was. I don’t know that I am, but I’m working on it. Drake is nothing like a Tanith Lee book, but I like to think that at the heart of it there is a little of her voice.

Tanith passed away last year and it my greatest professional regret that I never got to meet her and just tell her “thank you.” But then how many people get to meet their deity?

This Easter weekend though I did get to meet her husband, John Kaiine.

John is an absolutely lovely man and a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. We were at EasterCon in Manchester, UK, and John was there to speak on a panel held in tribute to Tanith. Hosted by Storm Constantine, the panel consisted of John and the Night’s Nieces – Kari Sperring, Sarah Singleton, Freda Warrington and Liz Williams, all writers who Tanith had inspired and mentored. John and the others spoke beautifully about Tanith and her work. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room by the end of the hour.

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