Last week, in the second post of my series on writing short stories, I had already missed my weekly goals. Hardly the end of the world, but I was still a little disappointed in myself.
I have a notebook from NaNoWriMo that says “Write Every Day” on the cover. It’s exactly the thing that NaNoWriMo advocates. It might be the most commonly given writing advice. After all, if you want to be prolific, you’re going to need to write a lot. Right?
Well, yes and no.
The reason we have this mantra is because it’s hard. Most of us don’t write every day, even if we aspire to. However, simple aphorisms usually obscure a more complicated truth. Writing every day doesn’t guarantee success, and success doesn’t require writing every day.
The Self-Designed Job
Most of us who write fiction on spec are writing entirely on our own. There is no job description, no education or work history requirements. Nobody evaluated our resumes. We woke up one day and decided to write. Even those of us who have more formal writing jobs are often freelancers or contractors.
It can be powerful to choose your own goals and working hours. It can also be difficult. It’s not as simple as going into the office 9–5. It’s not as easy as having work handed down from a boss. Being self-directed means there are no defined boundaries to the job. You can work too little, or far too much.
I realized a few years ago that I was always setting goals for myself, and almost never satisfied with my own achievement. My performance reviews for my self-defined job were consistently bad. But this is really just my own personality issue. It doesn’t actually reflect my performance. Understanding that, I can more easily recognize that feeling and let it go.
Writing is More Than Writing
It’s not surprising how many writers hate talking about their own work, or trying to sell it. We write because we love writing, not because we want to do writing-adjacent business stuff. Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. If you want people to read what you’re writing, there’s probably some amount of business and self-promotion that needs to be done.
Beyond that, writing is more than putting words on the page. There’s work to be done before the first draft, coming up with ideas and refining them. There’s work to be done after, revising and editing. There are classes, books, and blogs about craft.
There is even the undefinable work of being out in the world, observing people and things, having the experiences that will inform the work. Fiction can only be as interesting as the inner world of the author. That stew of ideas requires ingredients and time.
I’ve even found blogging or journaling to be incredibly useful for my writing. Sometimes experience isn’t enough; it takes reflection to unlock that understanding. I can’t count the number of times that writing about my process resulted in exciting new ideas.
Moving Toward the Mountain
If you’re like me, and you have that voice in the back of your head that complains when you’re not writing “enough,” there are a few things you can do to address it. Make a list of all the things that contribute to the writing. Include things like ideation, editing, and critique. Include that fun business stuff, whether it be sending work to traditional publishers, working on self-publishing, or something as mundane as accounting for taxes. Include reflection, like blogging or journaling.
Ask yourself honestly if you’re allocating enough time to rest, recharge, and feed that stew of ideas that will, in turn, feed your stories. Don’t be afraid of taking a break, or even a vacation. If you want writing to be a “real” job, it should come with sick days and vacation time.
When pursuing goals, there are a lot of different ways to move toward the mountain. Sometimes the path isn’t straight. We have to put words to paper if we’re going to be writers. But not necessarily every day.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in progress – 1
Submissions this week – 0 (1 currently out)
An Unproductive Week, A Cool New Tool
Short post this week, as I ended up being busy and didn’t get much done in the short story department.
I did discover an exciting new tool, Chill Subs. It already provides a publication database and submission tracking tool for writers, similar to the Submission Grinder and Duotrope. Even better, it’s looking to unseat Submittable as the de facto tool for editors to receive and track submissions.
In recent years, Submittable has become almost ubiquitous among literary fiction magazines, pushing the transition from snail mail to electronic submissions for short fiction. But its pricing scheme is predatory. It charges not only a monthly fee, but a fee per submission processed. Since so many literary magazines live on the budgetary knife’s edge, this has helped to drive the now-common submission fees for literary writers hoping to get their fiction published.
I feel lucky to work in genre fiction. The fantasy and science fiction space has more than its fair share of technical people. We’re lucky to have developed tools like Moksha and the Clarkesworld submission system.
Chill Subs aims to bring its own submission manager to market some time in Fall 2024. Their delightful website even allows you to choose how optimistic you are about their chances, updating the language and graphics accordingly. It’s a small team operating with a surprising amount of transparency, and their love of the craft (and the authors and editors) shines through. I don’t know if I’m “confident AF,” but I really hope they succeed.
Goals for Next Week
Same as last time!
Revise “Pleasant Hills”
Research more publications and submit at least one drabble
I’m always on the lookout for good books on the craft of writing. Over the years, I’ve discovered that there are actually quite a few of them. I have at least a dozen on my bookshelf at any given time, a selection that morphs slowly, like the ship of Theseus. In fact, there are probably hundreds of good books on writing. These books have a tidbit here or there that will lodge in your head, only to pop up at an opportune moment, leading to some small improvement. Or they’ll provide some high-level idea that inspires an adjustment in your way of working.
Consider This is something else. Having just read it for the first time, I think it’s safe to say that it is one of those rare great books on writing. There is an easy way to tell if you are reading such a book. It reads like an autobiography. Writers see the world through writing, and it is only natural that we should get to know each other best through our writing philosophies. A great book on writing feels like you’ve cracked off a little piece of a writer’s soul and slipped it under your ribs. A warm little splinter next to your heart.
The subtitle of this book is, “Moments in my writing life after which everything was different.” I suspect a fair number of writers will count this book as one of those. This is not a book about how to write well. It’s a book about how to write when you are Chuck Palahniuk. And really, what other book could we possibly expect from him?
Postcards From the Tour
If you’re not familiar with Palahniuk (pronounced “paula-nick”), he is the author of Fight Club. He has written more than twenty other successful books and comics, a good amount of short fiction, and a few non-fiction pieces, but if you know him from anything it’s probably Fight Club. His writing career spans over thirty years.
Much like Stephen King’s On Writing, the book is half advice and half anecdotes from the author’s life. Unlike King, whose book is more or less neatly split into the writing parts and the biography parts, Palahniuk’s is a mish-mash.
Each chapter focuses on a particular broad topic: Textures, Establishing Your Authority, Tension, Process. Between these sections are Postcards from the Tour, vignettes from Palahniuk’s life that may or may not directly relate to what comes before and after. He wraps the thing up with a list of recommended reading, and an interesting, brief chapter called “Troubleshooting,” which is essentially a list of problems that you may run into with your work and his suggested solutions.
There are motifs that span the book, like the favorite quotes from authors Palahniuk has known, inscribed alongside tattoo art. “For a thing to endure, it must be made of either granite or words.” “Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.” “Never resolve a threat until you raise a larger one.” And, of course, “Readers love that shit.”
Palahniuk makes it clear that much of the advice he’s providing is not his own. It was given to him by others. He may have taken it to heart, tweaked it, and made it personal, but it is really a collection of advice from all of the people who helped shape him. When Palahniuk makes a point he wants you to remember, he says, “If you were my student, I’d tell you…,” but this is not workshop book. It is not a syllabus to be followed. It’s a conversation between fellow writers.
If You Were My Student
Consider This is packed with small pieces of good advice; so much that it is impractical to dig into all of them here. In fact, I kept running into things that made me pause to consider how they would help me in one way or another with the stories that I’m currently working on, and made me wonder if I needed to revise some pieces I thought were done.
He tells us there are three textures for conveying information: description, instruction, and exclamation. A man walks into a bar. You walk into a bar. Ouch!
He tells us attribution tags can provide a beat within a sentence. Use quotation marks for detail and realness, paraphrase for distance and diminishment.
He tells us the Little Voice is objective and factual. It is unadorned description, the documentary camera. The Big Voice is explicit narration, journal or letter. It is opinionated. Intercutting Big Voice and Little Voice can convey the feeling of time passing.
Palahniuk also makes more than a few suggestions that made me think, “That’s all well and good for Chuck, but what about the rest of us?”
He suggests that each chapter should be a self-contained short story, to the point that it could be published independently.
He suggests a liberal mixing of first, second and third person points of view.
He says we should create a repeated “chorus” to break up the story parts, like the rules of fight club. Use lists, ritual and repetition.
I have an unsettling suspicion. The parts that feel wrong to me—the parts that seem too unique to Palahniuk—might be just as useful as the parts I found immediately helpful. I just haven’t quite grasped them yet. Maybe in five years or a decade they’ll hit me like a lightning bolt and I’ll feel the need to revise all my works in progress yet again.
Readers Love That Shit
If it’s not obvious, I think this is a book on writing that most writers should own. It’s raw and personal, often strange, and very particular to Palahniuk. That’s precisely what makes it work. It’s a collection of writing advice from many writers, all channeled through Palahniuk over a decades-long career. I took copious notes on my first read through, and I have confidence that I will find an entirely new selection of things to consider when I read through it again.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in progress – 1
Submissions this week – 1 (1 currently out)
Reviewing the Backlog
This first week, I spent some time reviewing short stories that I already have finished and edited.
“Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder-Drug” is a 1400-word modern fantasy story about a man in a drug trial who experiences an unexpected transformation. It has already been through critique and polishing, and is ready to send out.
In general, there tend to be more venues for shorter stories than longer ones. This is a nice length because most publications will accept it. It’s right on the edge of flash fiction territory (depending on your exact definition).
I recently gave a Critters critique that got me thinking about story titles and the ways they can add to the story itself. I spent some time rethinking this title, and while I didn’t end up finding one I liked better, it was still time well-spent. One of the most valuable things I get out of critiquing others’ work is new insights that I can apply to my own work.
I also have four finished drabbles that I’m fairly satisfied with. One is new, but the other three are already posted here on Words Deferred, so they could only be submitted to publications that accept reprints.
I don’t really know how easy it is to sell drabbles, since they’re so short. I’ve only seen them in a couple of publications that specialize in them, so my guess is that they are harder to place than flash fiction in the 500-1000 word range.
Submitting Stories
Duotrope is a great tool for narrowing down possible places to submit stories. I start by narrowing my search to the appropriate genre(s) and length. I also limit my search to professional pay rates. Well-paying publications are going to be more competitive, but you might as well try. If the story gets rejected, you can always submit to the semi-pros markets next.
However, that filtered list of publications is just the start of the process. The bulk of the effort is in reviewing those publications to find a good fit. After all, it’s a waste of time to submit a story to a place that doesn’t publish what you’re writing.
Duotrope has interviews with the editors of some publications, and these (usually) provide some insight into what they’re looking for. Ultimately, though, the best way to get to know a publication is to read it.
So, I read a few of their stories, if possible, and try to get a feel for what the editors like. Conveniently, a lot of publications these days are online, and it’s common for at least some stories to be available for free.
This all has the added benefits of immersing my brain in good short fiction and giving me a better understanding of what the current market is like in my chosen genres. It feels like a lot of effort now, especially if I decide that a publication isn’t a good fit for the story I’m sending out, but I hope that over time I’ll develop a good feeling for many of these markets, and I won’t have to do quite so much research.
This week, I only submitted one story, “Dr. Clipboard,” and that’s at least partly because I spent a few days deciding where to submit.
Work In Progress
I have one story in progress, a 2000-word sci-fi story called “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” about the detonation of an architecture bomb with the power to reshape a city. It has been through critique and needs some revisions before it’ll be ready to go out the door.
The final story I’ll talk about this week is one that I’m just starting, tentatively titled “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime.” It’s a science fiction story about a performance artist who uses time travel to create his magnum opus. I’m going to try to write this in the form of an interview with the artist’s former assistant.
It’s interesting to note that the core ideas of both of these stories came from my brainstorming sessions with Story Engine cards.
Goals for Next Week
Revise “Pleasant Hills”
Research more publications and submit at least one drabble
This week’s reblog is a timely rant by Chuck Wendig in the ongoing argument over AI art. Chuck definitely falls on the anti-AI side, which is where I land these days as well.
If I paid an actual artist actual money to paint me Batman and Mario doing the bat-nasty, the artist would be the one executing. The artist is still the artist. I’m just the guy paying the artist and asking them to give me what I want.
This is a great articulation of an argument against “prompt engineers” being artists. Sure, it’s a lot faster to ask AI to generate 50 slightly different versions of the picture you want, but your input is really no different than if you asked an actual human artist to do it. There is a certain serendipitous process of discovery and choice in the work of creating art.
Commissioning art is not the same as making art, no matter how detailed your prompts are.
Early in the life of this blog, way back in 2020, I made my novel Razor Mountain a main feature. I thought it would be interesting to document the process of writing a book from start to finish, and put it out episodically. This had the added benefit of aligning my blogging with the fiction I wanted to complete. It kept me writing, and kept the blog active. I believe the tech bros call this “leveraging synergies.”
However, all good things come to an end, or at least slow to a crawl. I’m still in the process of revising Razor Mountain, but I’ve found that there just isn’t as much worth writing about in the revision process as there was when I was working toward a first draft.
In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, and it turned into a similar project almost by accident. I started writing about the process every day, and decided to stick with it for the entire month. The result was an extremely smooth NaNoWriMo experience, where I was able to reflect on what I was writing.
2024
Now, a new year has been released from a secret compartment in the ceiling, and threatens to roll over us like that boulder from Indiana Jones. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I do have a new goal for the year, which is both simple and difficult: write, edit, and submit as many short stories as possible.
Since it has worked well for me with other projects, I’m going to try blogging my way through this as well. This is self-serving: I want my writing here to encourage me to accomplish my fiction goals. The current plan is to do weekly updates, but I may adjust that depending on how much I have to say.
As usual with the traditional publishing process, rejection is the norm. So once a story is out for submission, it will likely rack up a number of rejections. Even for successful short story authors, this is pretty normal. It’s rough out there.
As with my previous projects, my goal is to provide transparency for the curious. I’ll be honest about my successes and failures, and I expect there to be plenty of failures. But it should be fun, and I have no doubt I’ll learn a lot in the process.
The Short Story Series
As long as we’re talking about short stories, I’ll take a moment to plug my series about writing short stories. I wrote these in mid-2022. I’ve been thinking about a project like this for a while.
The Beginner’s Guide starts with a white screen. The voiceover says,
Hi there, thank you very much for playing The Beginner’s Guide. My name is Davey Wreden, I wrote The Stanley Parable, and while that game tells a pretty absurd story, today I’m going to tell you about a series of events that happened between 2008 and 2011. We’re going to look at the games made by a friend of mine named Coda.
Now these games mean a lot to me. I met Coda in early 2009 at a time when I was really struggling with some personal stuff, and his work pointed me in a very powerful direction. I found it to be a good reference point for the kinds of creative works that I wanted to make.
Then, without ceremony, we’re dropped into a world: a facsimile of a desert town, a map for the game Counterstrike. It’s Coda’s first “game,” and Davey proceeds to tell us why he thinks it’s interesting. He explains that he thinks these games tell us something about their creator. Coda stopped making games, and Davey wants to figure out why. He even provides his Gmail address and asks for feedback from players.
The Beginner’s Guide is not a traditional game. Like The Stanley Parable, it’s very much in “walking simulator” territory. However, where The Stanley Parable was all about choice in game narrative, The Beginner’s Guide offers few choices, and no real way to exert control over the narrative. It’s more about experience than participation. It’s a little bit like a short mystery.
The Narrator
Davey will continue to provide voice-over explanations throughout the entire experience, with very few breaks. He is the tour guide as we travel through Coda’s games, most of them little more than small experiments. While the player usually has freedom to go wherever they want within a given game, Davey moves the player from one game to the next. Davey chooses to occasionally skip the player past content that he deems unimportant, like a complicated maze, in order to keep the narrative flow.
He constantly explains the real-life context of his relationship with Coda at the time each game was made, and inserts his own theories about what these games tell us about Coda and his emotional state over the years they knew each other. He is ever-present, and influences the player’s interpretation of Coda’s games in both subtle and overt ways.
The Context
This opening sequence and everything that follows it is designed to put the player in a particular mindset. It’s a framing device, and it sets our expectations of Davey and Coda. After all, this is a pretty strange premise for a game. We know Davey is a real person. He really wrote The Stanley Parable. But is this the real Davey?
Is Coda a real person? Did he really make these games? That seems less likely. And what exactly does the title of the game mean?
Davey is inherently an unreliable narrator, but he goes to unusual lengths to establish credibility and realism. He sets himself up as a sort of documentarian, chronicling and presenting these games.
As The Beginner’s Guide progresses, an astute player may notice that Davey’s interpretations of Coda’s games sometimes make sense, and sometimes…don’t. He overlooks the obvious. He dismisses nuanced questions as uninteresting.
He also has a peculiar way of talking about Coda, his games, and the fact that he stopped making them. Everything comes back to Davey, how it makes him feel, how it fulfills (or fails to fulfill) his needs.
The Turn
Davey’s narration is well done, and his commentary is enough to keep the game interesting for the relatively short play time of The Beginner’s Guide. However, what makes the game interesting is the ending, and I won’t spoil that.
It’s enough to say that there is a particular sequence where it becomes clear who Davey really is, and this recontextualization of him forces the player to reevaluate everything he has said up to that point. It immediately changes the obvious interpretations of Coda’s games.
Writing in video games is still young, and it’s rare for a video game to do something clever enough in its writing that it deserves the notice of writers in other media. The Beginner’s Guide is not a perfect game, but the setup, the turn, and the execution throughout is worth noticing.
The Game
The Beginner’s Guide is a small game. It takes around two hours to complete and it’s available for $10 on Steam. Go check it out.
Today’s reblog is Nathan Bransford’s recap of 2023. Bransford has worn many hats over the years: author, agent and editor, and is uniquely equipped to sort signal from noise in the writing and publishing landscape. This year’s takeaway is that it’s a weird and uncertain time to be an author or work in publishing.
Major acquisitions continue, nobody knows what’s going to happen with AI or the social media landscape, and we have yet to see what the long-term effects of the pandemic will be on the industry as a whole.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. The end of the year really snuck up on me. I didn’t have a lot of time to read in November due to NaNoWriMo, and I was busy with holidays in December, so I decided to roll them together into a single blog post.
As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Monster (Vol. 1 – 18)
By Naoki Urasawa
My interest in this series stems from watching an episode or two of the anime based on these books several years ago. Conveniently, one of my co-workers is an avid collector, so I was able to borrow the whole series over my Christmas vacation.
What s stands out about Monster is the subject matter and setting. So much anime and manga follows familiar formulas, and this one is refreshingly different.
Dr. Kenzo Tenma is a Japanese immigrant in west Germany, shortly before reunification. He is a brilliant neurosurgeon with a promising future at a prestigious hospital. He’s a favorite of the hospital’s director, and engaged to the director’s daughter.
However, Tenma has a crisis of conscience after he’s ordered to save the life of a famous performer instead of the poor immigrant worker who arrived first. The next time he has to make a similar choice, he rejects hospital politics, saving the life of a boy shot in the head, while less skilled surgeons are unable to save an important donor who came in shortly after.
Overnight, Tenma’s life begins to collapse. The director refuses to talk to him, his engagement is broken off, and he’s overlooked for promotion. His fortunes turn yet again when the director and two of his allies are found poisoned, and the remaining hospital leadership puts him in charge.
A decade later, Tenma comes across the boy he saved, now an adult. To his horror, the boy seems to be tied up in a string of serial murders, and kills a man in front of the doctor. He reveals that he was the one who poisoned Tenma’s co-workers.
With Tenma once again close to a murder, a federal investigator takes an interest in him, trying to pin all the murders on the doctor. Tenma is wracked with guilt for saving the boy who has turned out to be a monster, but he has no evidence, and only he knows the truth. When the police attempt to arrest Tenma, he decides to flee and chase down the boy he saved, to kill him and stop him from harming anyone else.
The series follows Tenma as he evades the authorities and slowly uncovers the mysterious and disturbing origins of the monster, Johan, while helping people along the way. He uncovers the history of secret psychological experiments on children, and the legacy of the people who once ran those experiments, as well as the damaged children that came out of them.
Set in 1990s Germany and Czechoslovakia, the setting is phenomenally well-executed. The characters are excellent, and the mystery is compelling. Unfortunately, I felt like the story was treading water in some of the later volumes, and the conclusion wasn’t as satisfying as the opening. Regardless, this is still a fantastic manga, and a great story for anyone who is turned off by the usual anime/manga tropes and settings.
The Department of Truth is a comic built on the well-worn fantasy premise that peoples’ collective belief can physically change the world. It feels especially relevant in our current moment, when it sometimes feels like our different political and cultural factions are living in entirely different universes.
Cole Turner is a teacher at Quantico specializing in home-grown American extremism. In the course of his research, he attends a flat-earther convention, where he attends a showing of Stanley Kubric’s fake moon landing tapes before being whisked off with a select group on a private jet to see something even more impossible: the literal edge of the world. The trip is cut short when the group is unceremoniously gunned-down, and Cole is taken in for questioning by a group calling themselves The Department of Truth.
The Department of Truth is the secret government agency responsible for monitoring the effects that collective beliefs have on the fabric of reality, and keeping them in check. What exactly does that entail? Well, that’s the complicated part. They cut down conspiracy theories, killing and ruining lives when they deem it necessary for the greater good. It’s a messy job. The agency’s leader, none other than Lee Harvey Oswald, recruits Cole as a new member.
This first volume does a good job laying the groundwork of setting and characters, and brewing up a big fight. There’s an enemy organization called Black Hat working against the Department of Truth. They are trying to change the narrative, to put real evidence of the conspiracy theories out into the world. They want to reveal and destroy the Department of Truth, and it turns out they’ve been watching Cole for a long time.
Unlike similar stories, this doesn’t shy away from real, modern conspiracies. In this first volume it touches on classics like the Kennedy assassination and the satanic panic, but it also hits Obama’s birth certificate, “pizzagate,” Epstein’s suicide, flat earth, school shooting “crisis actors,” 9/11 as an inside job, and the whole QAnon/deep-state mish-mash. There’s effectively infinite material for them to riff on, since conspiracy theories are practically mainstream these days.
The book also features a gay main character, without making a big fuss about it. Unfortunately, Cole’s personal life with his husband is hardly touched on. Between the conference and his recruitment, he goes missing for a couple of days, and it results in a mildly heated argument. The relationship boils down to one face-to-face scene and a phone call in this first volume. I would have liked to have gotten more, and it would help to flesh out Cole as a character. However, there’s a lot of hinting that his background will tie into the story more and more as we go deeper, so I’m hopeful that there will be more in future volumes.
The art style is grimy, dark, and impressionistic. It’s more about conveying mood than the literal scenery, and the moods are not generally happy ones. Characters’ inner thoughts are expressed as shadowy images lurking behind them. Almost every image is filtered through TV scan lines, ink splatters, deep chiaroscuro shadows, and scribbled linework. This intense abstraction is appropriate for a story where there’s a blurring between truth and fiction, and dark things really are lurking in the shadows.
Unfortunately, the darkness and the abstraction sometimes make it hard to tell what is actually happening. On more than one occasion, I found myself having to re-read a two-page spread because the panel order wasn’t clear from the layout. I don’t mind unusual layouts (Sandman Overture is still my favorite art in any comic, and it almost never uses “normal” layouts), but there’s a real difficulty in not confusing the reader. The Department of Truth doesn’t always quite hit that mark.
Overall, I really enjoyed the Department of Truth, Vol. 1, and I’ll definitely be picking up more of the series.
The Potter read-through with kids continues. This is the middle book of the series, and it feels like a middle book. There are still a few of the kid-centric tropes and patterns that have repeated through the earlier volumes, like a red-herring bad guy and a mystery to be solved. It’s also doing a lot of work to set up everything that’s going to happen in the next three books.
This book clearly signals darker stuff to come, with the main villain finally arriving, and a death near the end of the book. Still, I couldn’t help feel that the dead character wasn’t actually all that important in the grand scheme of the story. There is a broad cast of side characters that have been built up across the first few books, and any one of them dying would have had more impact.
Once again, the biggest lesson this series teaches is that adults are all useless. They’re either outright evil, incompetent, or just don’t trust the kids enough to inform or direct them in any useful way. Of course, this is a theme that’s pretty common in kids’ books. It wouldn’t be fun if the adults took care of everything.
What I’m Reading in January
Harry Potter continues, I dig into more of the comics I got for Christmas, and I’ll definitely (probably) finally return to the Witcher series. See you then.
Words Deferred 