This week’s reblog comes from screenwriter John August, of the popular Script Notes podcast. If you’re a fan of Script Notes, his SubStack Inneresting is really just more of the same in text form. I’d highly recommend it.
As usual, August comes at his topics from a screenwriter’s perspective, but the discussion pertains to any kind of writer. This one is a mailbag post addressing questions of confidence in writing.
First, there’s the question of insecurity vs. arrogance. I think most of us struggle with this in some form or another, even if we don’t have full-on imposter syndrome. When I was young, I read some advice that suggested cultivating both feelings simultaneously: be your own biggest critic, while also remembering all the ways that you’re fantastic. It’s a bit of a mental magic trick, but it’s a good goal to strive for.
Other questions include whether it benefits a writer to be unpopular or self-obsessed, and what to do when you’ve lost your confidence.
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
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Rejections This Year – 2
It’s Quiet. Too Quiet…
I received no responses this week. Based on the average response times for the two places I’ve submitted, I expect to get at least one next week. Of course, as I get more stories into the rotation, this will pick up, and I’ll have fewer “quiet” weeks.
Revisions for Pleasant Hills
This was my big goal for the past few weeks: finish revisions on “The Incident at Pleasant Hills.” It only took about three times as long as I planned, but I’m happy with how the story turned out.
I finished with all of my revision notes, and it’s going to get one last read-through from my wife. Once she’s done and I’ve addressed her final feedback, it’ll be ready to send out.
Another One
One of the many nice things about writing short stories is that each one requires considerably less up-front thought than a novel. Now that I’m done with Pleasant Hills, I can jump right into the next.
I mentioned in previous weeks that I was thinking about “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime,” a story about a performance artist who uses time travel to make his point. I briefly thought about writing the story from the artist’s perspective, but I eventually decided that it would work better if it was told by his former assistant in the form of a magazine interview. Because the article is written with the expectation that the reader will already be familiar with some of the events of the story, I can leave out certain information at first, and create some twists and turns as it is revealed.
I reviewed my notes for this story, and discovered that I had actually written a few tentative pages at some point. I have a pretty clear idea of the ending, so I just need to plan out the rough beats that lead to that ending.
Other Bits and Bobs
Before I get too deep into “Portrait,” I’m going to think about some other projects as well.
I’d like to spend some time thinking about interactive fiction, to see if I can come up with an idea for Plotopolis. However, since interactive fiction is so niche, I don’t want to spend too much time on it. If I submit something and get rejected, there really isn’t anywhere else to send it, so it’s a dead story.
I’m also still occasionally stirring the stew of ideas for themed submissions. I might spend another few hours this week more actively working on that.
Goals for Next Week
Think about interactive fiction and themed submissions
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
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Total Rejections – 2
(I doubt anyone is setting their watch to my blog posts, but I wanted to note that I’ll be shifting these updates to Mondays, which fits better with my writing schedule.)
Second Rejection
This week marked my second rejection of the year, a response for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had been out for about three weeks. I’ve now had one rejection for each story I’m submitting, which feels like a small milestone.
I’m learning to batch the effort of finding publications for a story by jotting down several options, so that when the story comes back to me, I can send it off again with less downtime.
Revisions for Pleasant Hills
After a couple weeks where I felt I wasn’t getting much done on this story, I tried to buckle down and get these revisions done. I even took a day off my day job to sneak in some extra writing time.
Revision is hard to quantify, especially with short stories. There are no word count quotas or chapters to measure progress against. I definitely get more done when I can set specific, measurable goals.
To that end, I made a checklist of problems to resolve and went through them one by one. Most of these items involved adding words, so the final step will be to trim, trim, trim.
So, as I suspected last week, I didn’t manage to finish. However, I’m close, and I should be done before the next update.
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
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Rejections – 1
The First Rejection of the Year
“Tom, Dick, and Derek” garnered my first rejection of the year. This was a turnaround of only a few days, but it’s not too surprising since it’s a drabble and the magazine was only accepting flash fiction. I’m still not entirely sure of the viability of 100-word stories, but I’ll continue submitting to flash fiction publications and see how it goes.
Revisions for Pleasant Hills
This week, I re-read all the feedback I had received for “The Incident at Pleasant Hills” and condensed it into a page of bullet points of things to address, and several more pages of small line edits and suggestions for wording improvements. Most of these are straightforward fixes. A few are things that the story needs, and I just need to figure out where to put them. But there are a couple problems that I don’t have a solution for yet.
One of the things I need to improve about my writing process is handling revisions. I was hoping to be done or close to done with this story last week, but now that I’m in the middle of it, I’ll be happy if I can get it all done in the next week. I’m quickly realizing that writing short stories is a juggling act between keeping finished stories out on submission, and writing and editing new stories.
Themed Submissions
I mentioned last time that I was thinking about trying some themed submissions.
This week, I trolled the Duotrope listings, looking for themed submissions in speculative fiction genres that pay pro and semi-pro rates. I started with the basic search, and was annoyed to find no good search options to filter down to these. So I searched the listings and read the submissions pages. It was only after I had gone through twenty or thirty publications that I discovered Duotrope’s entirely separate page, the Theme and Deadline Calendar, which is designed for exactly this.
Having gone on my own search before discovering these listings, I know it’s not showing everything that’s out there. For example, Apex Magazine’s monthly flash fiction contest doesn’t show up. This probably comes down to how the listings are categorized.
If you’ve got the time and the inclination to write for these themed submissions, it might be worth doing your own research to track them down. However, the Duotrope listing is pretty good, and won’t suck up a whole afternoon.
With a few options in hand, I spent time brainstorming for the Parsec short story contest’s “AI Mythology” theme. I filled a couple pages with Story Engine ideas, but nothing that particularly excited me. I find Story Engine useful because it creates interesting constraints, but in this case, where the theme is already a significant constraint, I think it might be too much.
I plan to come back to these themed submissions every week or two and try other methods of brainstorming. It’s a good exercise to stay productive when I don’t feel like working on the stories in progress.
Fun Find – Plotopolis
Plotopolis is a new site for interactive fiction. It’s launching this winter, but open for submissions and proposals now. If you’re not familiar with interactive fiction, I wrote a post about it. It can be as simple as Choose Your Own Adventure-style branching narrative, or as complex and gamified as Fallen London, with character attributes and an inventory of items.
Interactive fiction has gained some acceptance as gaming in general has entered the cultural mainstream, but it remains a fairly small niche, so it’s nice to see something like this popping up. Hopefully they find their feet and are able to stick around.
Goals for Next Week
Only one goal this week: revise Pleasant Hills! I want to get this one done and out for submission.
It’s a new year. I’m working on the pile of books and comics I got for Christmas, and mostly ignoring the books I had planned to read. Someday I’ll get back to The Witcher. Someday.
If any of these sound interesting, please use my bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of phallic rockets for billionaires.
I thought I had read nearly all of the Gaiman/McKean comics collaborations, but this one somehow slipped under my radar. Published in 1989, Signal to Noise is almost a prototype of their future work. It’s a little less subtle with its themes than later works, but it still shows that expertise at crafting a story that can be observed from a dozen different angles to reveal some new through-line or idea.
The “noise” cutting through the signal of the story is nonsensical text, hinting at meaning without ever finding it. At the end of the book, it’s explained that this text was produced by a text sampler program, a 1989 prototype of the LLMs that have recently become so prevalent.
McKean’s illustrations are a fever-dream. The filmmaker inhabits a foggy ghost world. The movie in his head is unfocused and clogged with snow. Pops of color cut through: the yellow of a wheel clamp on an illegally-parked car, a red traffic light, a rare splash of green from a potted plant. The story is drowning in monochrome blue-white-gray, and the splashes of color are quick breaths before going under again. The panels shift between purposely similar 4×4 squares (evoking strips of film) and luscious full-page spreads, especially potent in this oversized form-factor.
The main character is a filmmaker, who is dying. He’s composing a movie in his head: people in the year 999, waiting for the new year, when they expect the world to end. A dying man composing a story of the apocalypse. But the apocalypse never came for those people.
For me, the resonating theme of the book is creator’s remorse. The work, when done, is never as good as it was in your head. But there is always hope that the next piece will be the one that works. Still, there is joy in it. A finished piece of art evokes “the feeling that one has clawed back something from eternity, that one has put something over on a nodding god, that one has beaten the system.”
Continuing the theme of old Gaiman comics, we have short spin-off in the Sandman universe, starring the effervescent goth girl Death, possibly the most popular of the Endless, apart from Dream.
Once each century, Death must spend a day as a mortal, and this just happens to be that day. She meets a boy named Sexton, who happens to have written a suicide note he has yet to act on. He is utterly disillusioned with the world, as only an inexperienced teenager can be.
Death, going by Didi today, explains who she is and invites Sexton to spend the day with her. He does , complaining all the way, and only slowly coming to believe Didi really is the personification of Death.
The magic of the Sandman version of Death is that she knows everyone, and she loves everyone, regardless of how the average human might judge them. She embodies the Christian ideal of kindness that many people aspire to, and none really achieve. So, of course, she goes on a little adventure with Sexton, and it changes him. He gains a new outlook on life. I won’t spoil who ends up dying at the end.
If you like the Sandman universe, this is a fun little jaunt along the edges of it, with a few familiar faces, and a good story in its own right.
Persepolis is autobiographical history in the comic tradition of Maus. The author grew up in Iran, living in a well-off family of intellectuals.
The first part of the book is largely about Satrapi’s childhood, and the many revolutionary elements that led to the overthrow of the Shah, followed by the disappointment of groups like the communist revolutionaries when the movement was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists.
In the second half, Satrapi moves overseas, attends college in Germany. She gets into drugs, spends time homeless, and manages to rebuild her life. After her time abroad, she returns to Iran and finds herself chafing against the rules of the regime.
She finds a boyfriend and marries, but they are almost immediately unhappy. The end of the book is abrupt. She gets a divorce and moves overseas again, this time to France.
Although it’s sometimes disjointed, the book is a great ground-level introduction to the recent history of Iran and a culture that I certainly didn’t learn much about, growing up in America.
There seems to be an inherent dissonance in Iranian culture between public and private life. Despite Islamic theocracy, many Iranians hold on to Persian culture, seeing themselves as independent from the rest of the Middle East. The fundamentalist regime makes the consumption of alcohol and mixed-gender parties illegal, but they still secretly happen with regularity. Head coverings are mandatory and makeup is frowned-upon, but many women flout these rules, even in public when they think they can get away with it. Punishments for breaking these cultural rules can be avoided by paying a fine, which results in the wealthy having much more leeway than the poor.
While it might be cliche, the obvious takeaway is that Western countries have more in common with Iran than the uneducated (like me) might think. There is a thread of fierce personal independence and self-determination in these stories that will feel familiar to anyone who has grown up in America, as will the rifts between social classes and the mismatch between public perception and private reality.
The Potter read-through with my kids continues. It’s the fifth book in the seven-book Potter series, and everything’s falling apart. Wizard Hitler is back in town, consolidating power in secret. Meanwhile, the government refuses to believe the only evidence: the eyewitness testimony of our 15-year-old protagonist.
As a series of kids’ books, I’m willing to overlook some of the simplicity of world-building that a lot of folks like to harp on, but this book really makes it clear how dysfunctional the “wizarding world” is. There are a great many institutions that are unique in the wizarding world, and that makes it awfully easy to gain and abuse power.
There’s effectively only one wizard newspaper. The government apparently exerts tremendous control over it, and can just squash articles they don’t like. Harry only gets his story published in a homemade conspiracy zine.
There’s a very simple wizard government, with a single head of state that seems to have total control over the unicameral legislature. In fact, it’s not even clear if anyone except the wizard president even needs to sign off on new laws.
There’s a single, hellish maximum-security wizard prison, which seems to be the default punishment for any non-trivial offense. There’s a single wizard bank, just in case the all-powerful government wants to exert economic controls as well. Finally, there’s only one wizard school in the country, so it’s nice and easy to lock down that educational system.
The wizarding world is a model autocracy. No wonder a new wizard Hitler crops up every couple decades.
Anyway, this book marks Harry at his most persecuted. The all-powerful government hates him because he keeps saying that Voldemort is back, and exerts all its power to convince everyone he’s a crazy person. His friends are mostly children, so they can do very little about this. The few adults on his side have created a secret society to try to fight back, because they’d be targets for the all-powerful government if they were open about it.
The theme of being unable to depend on adults really reaches its peak here. The school is taken over by a sadistic pawn of the government, the adults who Harry trusts are picked off one-by-one, and even Dumbledore, who has always been a bit like Old Testament God (distant, but loving authority figure), purposely abandons Harry.
As usual, Harry leads the kids by ignoring all adult advice and doing what he thinks is best. On the one hand, this is a pretty bad idea because he knows full well that all the adults have been hiding a lot of information from him. He doesn’t really know what’s going on. As usual, he’s ignored their warnings. On the other hand, this has worked out well for him in every single book up to this point. Maybe if the adults wanted him to behave, they should have tried a little harder to parent the headstrong super-wizard orphan boy.
Where previous books like Prisoner of Azkaban toyed with the idea that Harry’s poorly thought-out actions might cause real problems, everything always turned out prefectly when he followed his gut. Even the first death of the series in Goblet of Fire was not really his fault. He got played by an adult he trusted. But in Order of the Phoenix, Harry lets his intuition guide him, against the advice of literally everyone, and the result is terrible.
Sure, they get incontrovertible evidence that Voldemort’s back. So that’s nice. It just costs the life of the only person Harry considers family.
There is also a problem of Harry’s personality in this book. He’s constantly angry, and generally mean to all of his friends. In the end, it turns out that he’s being psychically manipulated, but there really aren’t enough hints about what’s going on, so he just comes across as an unpleasant character for most of the book.
I won’t harp on this one, since I’ve already written a separate post about it. Suffice to say it’s the best book on writing that I’ve read in a few years.
What I’m Reading in February
Harry Potter continues. I’m halfway through a beautiful hardcover complete edition of the comic Die. I may dig into a stack of anthologies, to stay on-brand for my year of short stories. And there is always the eternal promise of jumping back into The Witcher. It could happen.
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
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Submitting a Drabble
I reviewed quite a few options this week, and ended up submitting my drabble, “Tom, Dick, and Derek,” to a magazine taking flash fiction submissions. I’ve never sent out a drabble before, and I have no idea whether the incredibly short format will be a disadvantage or not.
As a general rule, it’s a little easier to sell short stories than long ones. In the old days, when everything was on paper, this was a simple matter of limited pages. Magazines cost money to print, and there’s a limit to the number of words that will fit. In a world where many publications are entirely online or have a web component, the limiting factor might be attention, rather than space.
However, I suspect the general rule breaks down when a story gets below about 500 words. While there are plenty of places to sell flash fiction, when the story gets short enough, the format becomes a distinguishing feature. There are a handful of publications that specialize in drabbles, but they’re few and far between.
Critique Revisions
My short story, “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” is a more traditional short story at roughly 2000 words. I ran it through Critters a while ago, and got a lot of useful feedback. This week, I reacquainted myself with the story and began to re-read all that feedback, distilling it into broader issues and line edits. Hopefully I can finish those revisions this week.
Themed Submissions
While I was scanning publications in Duotrope this week, a few calls for themed submissions caught my eye. These are usually for one-off themed issues of magazines, but they can also pop up for anthologies or writing contests.
This is one of those things that I was aware of, but never really took seriously. Maybe it’s the difficulty of coming up with an interesting story for a specific prompt. Maybe it’s the concern that a story crafted to fit a theme will be harder to sell somewhere else if it’s rejected. However, if I’m going to be spending a year on short stories, it seems like a great time to get my feet wet.
I may spend some time brainstorming ideas for themed submissions this week, but if I don’t get around to it now, I’ll definitely try to dedicate some time later.
Words Deferred 