Gentlemen:

“Dod Grile” (Mr. Bierce) is a personal friend of mine, & I like him exceedingly — but he knows my opinion of the “Nuggets & Dust,” & so I do not mind exposing it to you. It is the vilest book that exists in print — or very nearly so. If you keep a “reader,” it is charity to believe he never really read that book, but framed his verdict upon hearsay.

Bierce has written some admirable things — fugitive pieces — but none of them are among the “Nuggets.” There is humor in Dod Grile, but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.

Ys truly

Samuel L. Clemens

That two star review on Amazon sort of loses its sting now, doesn’t it?

I will not fully engage my snark here because Jacqueline Howett does not seem to fit in the same category as professional authors undergoing a review meltdown (Anne Rice for example).   She seems slightly more entitled to a bit of sympathy for her misstep. Her repeated misstep. Missteps ending with the eloquent:

“Fuck Off.”

More’s the pity because the review in question actually suggests that she has promise as a writer, and just needs some fairly serious copy-editing. (Note to self-publishers:  Everyone needs copy-editing.  Get yourself some before you start uploading files. This is one of the responsibilities you assume by bypassing traditional publishing.) Now, because of her public tantrum, she’s now known for being the author who had a hissy fit over her own bad sentence construction. (She’ll be lucky if the following sentence does not become an internet meme: “Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”)

So it doesn’t matter if you’re professionally published, self-published, or uploading things to fanfiction.net.  All public internet whining gets you is a fist full of abuse from folks who love this sort of thing, and a reputation as one of “those” authors. I mean, editors do Google you, and it doesn’t help you if this or this is one of the top results.

Colleen Lindsay:

Thank you for making it clear, through your response to my query, that you are unquipped (sic) to represent fiction writers who are working at the very highest level today.

Best of luck with your list of minor writers, third-rate writers, irrelevant writers, non-writers.

You lose, silly woman.

Patrick Roscoe

I pointed, I laughed, I moved on with my life. Imagine my surprise when today, in my spam filter, I find a comment from someone coming to defend Mr. Roscoe’s honor from such ill deserved mocking engage in an attempt at their own mockery at the expense of myself. Turns out, someone put my Roscoe post up on Reddit and it started a tiny little flame war with Mr. Roscoe’s champion. I’m sort of flattered.

She also said my title sounded like soft-core porn, so I have to fix that too.

I admit, it was probably the right decision.

If you want to really do this, you can’t complain about lacking the time.  If you lack the time, it’s only because you have placed things higher on the priority list than actually writing.

Things like blogging. . .

That is all.

Anyway, still alive, activity on the Blog and Facebook to the contrary.

If I don’t blog before then, Merry Christmas.

Burkean conservativism tends to be skeptical of change, always asking first, “will it make things worse?” This isn’t a bad question to ask in and of itself, but we’re immured a period of change unprecedented in human history (it kicked off around the 1650s; its end is not yet in sight) and basing your policies on what you can see in your rear-view mirror leaves you open to driving over unforseen pot-holes.

I tend to see the false dilemma created by assuming that conservative policies are the only ones that fail to forsee potholes. I mean, look at all the great centralized economies of the 20th Century. But that’s neither here nor there.  What Stross would like to see is an attempt to deal with the future in a positive manner:

We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness without destroying our resource base.

Ok, I can see that.  But even that paragraph starts radiating the inherent bias that gives the lie to the final clause.  All Utopias, since they ARE the solution, are synthetic monocultures that accept no dissent.  The above essentially tells us in this particular “Utopian” vision, we all must adapt to densely-packed urban living.  Those who much prefer to live in a small town or rural environment would be SOL when it comes to peruse their happiness.  But we can fix that, by controlling the population…  Ooops, now we have China.

The problem is inherent in one of Stross’ premises:

[...] we should be able to create a new golden age of utopian visions. A global civilization appears to be emerging for the first time. It’s unstable, unevenly distributed, and blindly fumbling its way forward. But we have unprecedented tools for sharing information; slowly developing theories of behavioural economics, cognitive bias, and communications that move beyond the crudely simplistic (and wrong) 19th century models of perfectly rational market actors [...]

There is the assumption that some universal global order is inevitable and in some sense desirable. It’s neither. It is not inevitable because the cultural and societal norms across the entire planet are divergent enough that a truly universal social order is only going to be possible by either making it so diffuse as to be largely irrelevant, or so powerful that it can crush the outlying populations into a thin paste. It is not desirable because you are giving your whole social order a single point of failure. With a single global order, you insure that when things finally go pear-shaped (and the one immutable rule of history is that things will) it takes down the whole planet with it. Our current series of crises are a demonstration of the principle: If Greece had bankrupted itself fifty years ago, no one would have cared.

So one answer to Stross’ final lament:

Because historically, when a civilization collapsed, it collapsed in isolation: but if our newly global civilization collapses, what then …?

Is to say, “don’t put all your eggs in that particular basket.”

That’s my process.  When I do my revisions, I basically clone a new copy of the MS (which is usually separated into a different Word Document for each chapter) and do my edits on the computer on the new copy.  Above is fairly typical.  I end up with four to five folders with different drafts.  And a “final” which is what goes off to the editor.

First, what lessons this provides a newbie author:

1. The first rule of writing: to be a writer one has to write. This is not planning to write. Not talking about writing. Not regaling forums on teh interwebz about what you’re writing. Not reading books or blog posts about writing. Not doing research, making character sketches, color-coding your filing system, or playing with Google street view to find the perfect house for your kick-ass heroine. This is butt-in-chair putting-words-down-in-proper-order-writing. It is the only essential task, and if you came up against NaNoWriMo and it kicked your ass even though you spent every day on the forums on their site talking about what a tough time you were having, you need to keep reading this paragraph until you realize where you went wrong.
2. The second rule of writing: to be a writer one has to continue writing. In other words, novels are long, and require a certain amount of discipline to even attempt, much less finish. Waiting for the muse to strike is all well and good, but if you don’t learn to keep at a project every day until it’s finished, you will end up with a lot of first chapters, but precious few first drafts.
3. The importance of being able to kick the internal editor off the bus for the duration. To write at a professional level, editing and polishing your prose is an essential step, but you need to train yourself not to mix revision with writing. They are two different animals, and if the editor is driving when you’re trying to get a draft done, you risk getting caught in an infinite loop of write, go back and fix what you just wrote, write more, go back and fix everything to that point, repeat. . . until you have a wonderfully shiny first chapter, but again, no first draft. This isn’t to say you cant revise something that’s in process (sometimes you have to) but you put down the writing hat and pick up the editing hat. And if you find yourself doing that switch off more than a couple times during a single project you may want to reconsider how you’re going about that project. (Maybe you need a little outlining, some continuity notes, or a higher threshold for clunky prose in a first draft.)
4. For those that completed the task, it gives a realistic understanding of just how much work this actually is. All this effort and you have 50K of first draft that most likely is not even a complete novel. If you accomplish this— or even a substantial portion of it— and you’re still excited about what you’re doing, you may just be cut out for this writing thing.

What I, the established pro, got out of it:

1. A demonstration that I could do it, which was not as much a given as it might appear. Prolific I might be, but that’s because I write steadily, not because I write quickly. I normally do something like 600 – 1000 words a day, this required me to double my regular productivity for a month. (Thus the virtual shutdown of my blog.)
2. A demonstration that I could do this without any prep work. Almost everything else I’ve written has had months, if not years, of fermenting ideas before I set first word to page. The two exceptions are notable for being the two other novels where I also approached this kind of productivity for an extended period. (TeeK and Wolfbreed for the curious.) This time round I made a conscious decision to do this with an idea I had driving home from WFC the day before NaMoWriMo started. This suggests I may be able to force my Muse into slave-driver mode. Good to know.
3. I got the raw material for a brand new novel, which may help me eat at some point in the future. This is a good thing.

Well I did it (go me!), 50K words in a month.  This is a task I’ve manged before, but never as a conscious act.  Before, the few times I’ve been this productive, I’ve had a muse with a whip chasing me.  This time I literally started completely cold.  All I had was an idea that occurred to me on Oct 31, so I had no outlines laying about, no long-deferred story ideas that had been waiting for me.  Thirty days later, I have fifty-thousand words, most of which I think are usable in some form.

Some things I might cut;  dream sequences I wrote to get out of a block (though their back-story might survive a rewrite) and the smoking hot sex scene that may be out of place in a YA novel.

Now I let it cool for a bit and go on to a proposal I was working on before I started this.  After that’s to bed, I think I may go back and finish this thing, once I outline the second half of it.

“He killed her here,” she whispered.

“Who? What?”

“She didn’t like what he was doing, this place, what lived here. She begged him to move, to take the family away from this place. They argued, yelled, screamed. The floor was just vinyl stick on tile, old and brittle.” Her face had gone blank, and while her eyes were open, she didn’t look at him, she looked past him. “It started as a freak accident. This place didn’t like her. They argued. A tile came loose. She fell. Her foot hooked under the stove and twisted. Her leg broke.”

“Amy?” Jason looked at her, and she didn’t seem to be here anymore, she spoke as if she was in a trance.

“She tried to get up. He grabbed a cast-iron skillet from the stove. She’d been cooking breakfast.”

“Amy?” Jason grabbed her shoulders. “You can stop now.”

“The whole kitchen smelled of bacon. You could hear the grease sizzling.”

“You can stop. Please.”

“Some of the sizzling might have been his hand when he grabbed the handle. He was too angry to notice how hot it was.”

“Amy!” he shook her shoulders.

“Down into her face. Hit with a dull thud. Stopped her screaming.”

“Stop it!” he screamed into her face.

That seemed to snap her out of it. The blank expression regained animation, and she blinked her eyes and was actually looking at him now. He could see now that her cheeks were damp with tears. He felt her start to shake.

Then, all the lights in the kitchen winked out.

Scalzi on MFA Programs and what is left untaught.  (With followup.)

Charlie Stross is dissatisfied with Steampunk. (Yes, I’m late to this particular party.)

First thing we do, let’s kill all the writers.

The girl at the top of the stairs was older than Kelly, four or five. Her skin was pale to the point that it looked white even in shadow. Her hair was long and black, falling over her shoulders. She wore a nightgown that seemed to come from another century. Her feet were bare, and streaked with black.

She stared down at him with eyes invisible in the shadows of her face, and beneath that gaze Jason felt a cold so deep that it burned.

“It will know you,” she whispered as she took a step down toward him. Jason clutched the banister so tightly that his knuckles went white. He took a step back even as he was consciously telling himself that he couldn’t be seeing what he thought he was seeing.

“It will know you,” she whispered very slowly, “and you will know it.”

Jason’s eyes widened as he realized that the girls eyes weren’t lost in shadow. They weren’t there at all. There was only a deep pit across her face where the eyes should have been, a pit dug deep into the skull. And in the darkness within it, something dark and glistening moved.

I’m pounding away at my YA ghost story, and as the blog title suggests, it’s taken a bit of a Lovecraftian turn.  It probably won’t be an explicit Mythos story, but there’s clearly some eldritch horrors hanging about.