On editors and the publishing process

So I'm a bit late on posting. Sorry about that. Poor time management on my part.

Self flagellation concluded, between trying to parse out accounting over an online course, big mistake, and establishing Iago's identity as an alien infiltrator for a paper in my English class, I've been pretty dang busy. Also, the wifey and I are getting ready for a two week camping trip.

So, I mentioned earlier I finally submitted my manuscript. It spent just a couple days in the hands of first readers whom I suspect were office lackeys before I got a rather aggravating e-mail from an editor, from a publishing house I'll never contact again, who demanded I make a series of changes. Now, this company had promised to be a great entryway into the world of the published author and I'd even been recommended to them by other writers.

Thing is, I've never seen one of their books on a book shelf. I'm not sure what to make of that.

In any case, the prime objection to the manuscript as submitted was how various characters, no matter how important to the story, could seemingly just die at any point without an emotional context. You know, a bit like in real life. Now, apparently, this was a bit jarring to the readers and thus some manner of change seems indicated as all parties involved wish to emerge profitably from the endeavor. Fair enough. However, what is certainly not indicated, was to have some nattering deconstructionist* tell me I have no idea how to 'convincingly portray a life and death situation.'

I'm no Ringo, or Kratman, or any of the other highly successful mil-SF authors out there. My experience of combat was, I suspect anyway, far different and more limited than at least the two I named. That said, I suspect I have a rather better idea of what combat looks, feels, sounds, and smells like than some office bound junior editor who has misinterpreted his job responsibilities to include literary criticism.

I would have at least liked a bit of consistency. With regards to one scene I'm being told that the emotional reactions of my characters are too pronounced and, apparently, an elite group of combat veterans should share the same ideological and emotional nihilism of the more pretentious breed of literary critic. Soldiers, apparently, are allowed no emotional range beyond angst ridden bitterness or bloodthirsty and amoral. However, when someone dies in a seemingly arbitrary fashion during an event in which he was essentially an interested spectator, this should have had a profound effect on the insufficiently emotionally-stunted survivors. Apparently, they should have taken a moment to reflect on the chaos, pointlessness, and random nature of war. Not, of course, as I was quickly consoled, that any of their views on what they were doing should have changed, but they certainly should have re-evaluated them. Nevermind that they had a mission to do and were already being shot at, hence the a fore mentioned death. No they should have had an emotional scene of some variety there.

Well, if your reading this, Mr. Editor, you can go stuff yourself.

That particular scene was the greatest source of contention and it is NOT getting changed. Yes, I have already changed quite a few other scenes and now I'm trying what to do with all these characters who are suddenly not dead. I'll deal with it. If nothing else, after the numerous rewrites at this point, I've certainly gained experience.

If/when this particular manuscripts does get published, I'm gonna mail an autographed copy to that little twerp with that scene dogeared and, "Suck it!" written in the margin at the end of the chapter.

*I already have enough of a problem with deconstruction as a form of literary analysis as it essentially intends to prove that nothing actually means anything. Which of course is an incomplete method as at least some things have a very obvious, clear cut moral to them. With a very few notable exceptions, I've only seen deconstruction used to 'prove' that no piece of literature communicates any idea that the deconstructionist objects to.

So I've been writing a bit

Not here, obviously. I finished up the manuscript, pared it down a bit, and edited for grammar and punctuation. Took a deep breath and sent it off into the world.

Only to promptly get it kicked back to me. Apparently, when an important character dies it cannot seem random and/or arbitrary. Also it must be emotionally meaningful and have a dramatic impact on the surviving characters, never mind the fact that they had a combat mission to finish.

I'll likely gripe about that in a bit more length later, but the salient detail is that, since I want to be published for $$*, I've been doing a rather extensive rewrite. Apparently, using a random number generator to decide when someone will die is unsettling and jarring to the reader. You know, kind of like it is to people who actually go through combat.

Not being able to spare time for a more meaningful post, I've been neglecting this blog. I shall endeavor to rectify this shortcoming. Of course, I've said that before so caveat emptor.

Be seeing you around, poetry corner tomorrow and the exciting story of how a young, aspiring author nearly killed an editor by beaming pure hate through e-mail.

*artistic vision, integrity, or whatever else you want to call it is nice, but I want money. Sweet, sweet money. And just as a stab in the eye, the death scene which was the largest source of contention will NOT be changed.

The conquering hero has...

...certainly not returned in the person of yours truly. I haven't been doing any conquering and I'm definitely no hero. Heck, I never did get this new electron box entirely squared away to my liking. I simply decided that I had hit the point where it was no longer worth trying to get my new Vista machine to act like my well and truly tweaked old XP one. I may still, at some point in the future, install a different OS, but I just don't feel like messing with it anymore.

As for the book? Ah, such stories I could tell...which I think is the point. I'm not sure anymore. Somewhere in the midst of trying to write the final battle sequence from several dozen viewpoints, as opposed to the three from the rest of the book, I realized that I had gone way over the thirty thousand word goal I had set for myself. Not just that, but the battle had only just reached the point where the plan falls apart.* In other words, it was only just getting involved. The problem is that each viewpoint character has a role throughout the entirety of the battle, so I didn't want to just skip one viewpoint ahead while the viewpoint is covering another angle.

Well, that particular method of reading about a battle may be the joy of historians attempting to recreate an entire battle, it's not such a good way for a novice author to tell a story. I am sure anyone reading it as it currently is (I'm not even close to finished fixing it) would quickly become bored with reading about the same event, over and over, but from different viewpoints. It only worked in Vantage because; one, each revealed a good bit of new information and two, there were only a few viewpoints, not dozens.

So I've been fixing it in segments, deciding what events can simply be summarized afterward, likely by whatever poor bastards lived through them, what should the protagonist be aware of, what can be revealed by one-off viewpoints (like a narrator or a bad guy), and what to just pare away as excessive (probably a lot).

In other words, not the best of times as far as writing goes. That's okay though, I think I'll maintain sufficient motivation simply because I'm so close to being done. Then I get to start on the next one having already learned everything I did from this one. Hopefully, that'll help me avoid the problem I'm having currently, without which I think I'd be done by now and well into editing.

Oh well.

I have a few posts planned out regarding current events. I might even do them today, but that depends on how frustrated I get with writing. So, if I end up burning up the intratubes, it means I've gotten frustrated. In any event, I won't say watch this space.

*I suppose that could be a spoiler, but I doubt anyone who reads through the rest of book would be even a little surprised. The characters sure aren't.

Grumbling and muttering

Haven't blogged in a while, obviously. I'm sure whatever small readership I developed is now gone. Oh well, my fault.

The reason I have not been writing is, amusingly, that I have been. I set out some time ago to write a book and then have it published. Hardly the first time I've taken to writing a lengthy story, but this time I had a plan that would, hopefully, avoid wrangling with a publisher and editor. Such wrangling is outside my skill set and the reason I've never had anything published. I'm just not very good at revising my own work, especially when I make a mistake in continuity.

But this time, I had a plan! Before the first word of the first chapter was ever committed to a Word document, I had written detailed biographies of each and every character of importance, I even had a list of tertiary characters at what was important about them. I had an outline that was just under twelve thousand words in length (for reference: most books are around one hundred thousand). I had detailed notes about every spaceship involved, its history, crew roster, armaments, performance, and quirks. Every planet and polity (obviously a sci-fi) was detailed down to the demographics, who was in power, political structure, and laws. All the technological and cultural changes in humanity was carefully plotted along a detailed timeline.

Truly, a masterpiece was about to unfold. Only...I noticed as the story unfolded that it was kind of stilted, seemingly disjointed. The plot twists hardly seemed like twists at all, more like inevitable outcomes of the string of events. I shrugged that off and plowed ahead, promising myself that my live-in editor (the Wifey) and I would fix it easily in the first revision. The continued until I had over sixty thousand of the planned hundred and twenty. Despite knowing what was to happen next, with the assistance of my handy outline, I could not seem to get the story from point A to point B (or point H to I in this case) in a manner that seemed both logical and to flow pleasingly.

The problem, obvious in retrospect, was that by arranging so many details ahead of time, I had severely limited my options when writing. Worse, it just wasn't any fun, which tends to stifle my creativity. If I wanted a character to do something that might seem counter-indicated, like leap up from cover and run screaming towards the badguys, I told myself that it didn't fit the bio, no matter how much my mental picture of the character said that was exactly what he would do. Looking back over what I had, I can't imagine any way to make it even remotely readable without a complete rewrite.

So I gave up on writing for a few weeks. Thought about at least posting on the blog, couldn't get motivated to do it. Heck, I even had a hard time getting my essays done on time for my homework. I seem unusually prone to writer's block when frustrated.

Well, about a week ago I had a conversation with some old friends of mine, who both happened to be published authors and among my favorites at that. They gave me a few tips, most of which centered around being less of an anal retentive obsessive compulsive. Shocking that.

Which brings me to where I am now. About ten thousand words (Already?!) into a book that, as yet, lacks so much as an outline. At least a written one, I have a bare bones one in my head, but I'm not, apparently, allowed to commit it to any media until I've reached a certain point in the story. It's kind of funny, but has been amazingly effective. I feel almost like a passive observer as the outline as steadily transformed into something far more readable and exponentially more interesting than it would have been had I committed to it before I started letting the characters interact in my head.

The best part, is the solution to a problem I've had in writing even before my obsessive planning got out of hand. Despite my best efforts, I've never successfully injected humor into any story I've written. This goes back to the first time I wrote one back in grade school. The problem is trying to put humor into a story. It don't work that way, Cleetus. It has to already be there, all the author should have to do at that point is simply bring it to light. The characters, at least some, must have senses of humor and the circumstances simply have to give them something to laugh at every now and then. My current story has thus far been, at various points, both hilarious and spine tingling and it all flows logically. Sure, most of the humor is of the dark and/or gallows variety, but some will no doubt be labeled sophmoric. That's fine with me, I know first hand just what people's sense of humor will do in bad situations and I think I'm pretty close.

So, got that all off my chest and an entire blog post written, hopefully the first of more to come.

Time will tell...

R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke

The last of the big three has died. While of the three (Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke) he was my least favorite, that's hardly a condemnation considering his contemporaries. He wrote 2001, A space Odyssey, 2010, Rendezvous with Rama, and many other greats. He even originated the idea of geosynchronous orbit.

He was a visionary and he dared us to look beyond the horizons of our little planet and into space.

A visit to the bookstore

I love going to bookstores. Neurotically so. The simple pleasure of being able to sift through shelf after shelf of nothing but books is why I almost never order books online, even if it is easier and often cheaper. I always have a few books I'm looking for in particular (and if I can't find them I'll get the store to order them) when I'm at a bookstore, but I always find one or two I would have never looked at while scanning the book racks.

Alas, there is only one bookstore worth mentioning (ie. the only one with a sci-fi section) here on my little island. The good news is, it has a huge section of used books. I love the old sci-fi and I feel like I'm digging up buried treasure as I sift through finding the occasional golden age classic (still haven't found Time enough for love though).

But today was something beyond just a normal visit to the bookstore. Oh, I picked up some of my usual fare; Pyramid Scheme by Eric Flint, another of his rather tongue-in-cheek surrealist stories, Star Strike by Ian Douglas, the first book in the third trilogy of his space marines stories, Celestial Hit List by Charles Ingrid, third book in the Sand Wars which has eluded me for a few weeks now, Anvil of Stars by Greg bear, a dimly remembered favorite from childhood. The real treat, however, was the smallest and cheapest book I bought.

Shortly before I joined the Navy (about a decade ago), I read a brief reference to another Greg Bear book called Hard Fought. At the time, I didn't think much of it, I just made a mental note to pick it up sometime. Boot camp came and went, then in A-school I remembered it and figured I needed some recreational reading anyway. Except, I couldn't find it. Not a big deal, even the three large bookstores at the local mall couldn't have every book. Then they couldn't order it because their distributors didn't have it either. The heck? About that time my training schedule began getting increasingly hectic and as I endured my whirlwind of a training pipeline I had to put it out of my mind.

It was two years after joining the navy that life calmed down a little bit (briefly) and I remembered having looked for this one book. I still knew very little about this book except that it had eluded me. That seems to be the single motivating factor here. So I checked the bookstores around my new command. Nope, of course not, and none of them could order it either. That seems to have done it. I got online and looked for it. Zip. When the Navy had me travel I would visit any bookstore I came across, if I had the time, and look. After awhile of doing that, I made up some contact cards and started giving them out to anyone who might come across a copy along with a twenty dollar bill and the promise of more, all over the world. The harder I looked for this damn book, the worse I wanted it. I even joined several internet groups that specialized in rare books. Four or five years into this sad tale, I even paid to have professionals find a copy. Nothing. One of my forum buddies did find a copy once, a few years back, but it was gone before he got a hold of me.

The worst part about it was, I heard from a few people who started looking after I did and managed to get a copy. So while it was rare, it wasn't that rare.

This carried on for ten years. TEN YEARS. I didn't even specify a first edition or anything else, just a copy, any copy, of the damned book.

You see where this is going, right? Of course you do.

I walked into my local bookstore today, looked around in sci-fi section (not sure the store has any other sections) for about thirty seconds and, yeah, there it was.

Bribing bookstore owners the world over: $20 (x?)
Contracting finder’s agencies: $50-150 (x4)
Finding the damn book for $2.00 at the local bookstore: priceless