Gaps and geysers

This unfortunately, is what happens each time I start writing – my blog goes in to spurt mode before it stops altogether :p The last time I started a novel, I think the blog went on a hiatus for a year and most of the regulars stopped visiting because they probably thought I was dead 🙂 This time so far, I’ve managed to at least make an entry every other day but the longer I keep writing, the more likely it is that the blog will start to suffer. So I came up with a plan :p

What’s the plan? The plan is to make at least a short entry every other day instead of my usually long rambling ones. Actually, the short entry might be easier for most people to read than my rambles – but then again, this entry already seems to be well on its way to being a ramble because I haven’t even gotten to the subject matter of today’s post. Which is a fairly funny video that I discovered online 🙂

What do you get when you combine two guys, a couple of spare lab coats, protective eyewear, 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? The answer? Watch the video below to find out :p

How do you find the time?

I believe it was Stephen King who said, "Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can’t expect to become a good writer." I admire people who can do that. I know I certainly can’t 🙂

Sure, I would love to read four hours a day even if I can’t write four hours a day – I’d probably get too tired of writing after a couple of hours. But what with working eight hours a day, doing a hundred other things in between, finding an hour to write a day is a big deal. No, this is not going to be a whine. Or then again, this is perhaps a bit of a whine but it’s also a look at how much time you can realistically devote to writing if writing is not your primary occupation. (Heck, at the moment, writing is not an occupation at all as far as I’m concerned :p The only money I get from writing these days is from some Google ads on a site I blog at …)

I can understand the need to keep to a regular schedule. Writing is a job just like anything else. You have to keep at it daily if you want to get anywhere. But the issue is always, how do you keep at it when there are so many other things clamouring for your attention? :p When I wrote my first novel, I would set aside a couple of hours every evening after I finished work. I would write till I had completed 2,000 words – that was my daily target. I think it took me about three months at that pace to complete my novel. Now that I’ve started my second novel, I find that I can’t be even as ambitious as that. So far, I’ve gotten like two pages a day and that is barely 500 words a day! Perhaps once I pick up steam I’ll do better or maybe I just need to let go of this whole idea that "I have no time to spare" and simply write? 🙂

A new novel

Sometimes, story ideas just come to you unexpectedly. Actually, that’s how all my story ideas come to me :p I had been thinking about the fact that I haven’t done enough writing recently (except for the editing and blogging) and thinking about how I was going to get back into the habit of writing daily. Writing my second novel, "Basement of the Universe" had kind of stalled for a few of reasons: 1) "Basement" ties into my first novel, "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" and so I want to know if "Honest" goes anywhere before I actually get going on a series of six books tied to "Honest" :p 2) "Basement" itself spawns two other novels (at least) and I’m not sure how it all ties in together yet 3) "Basement" has been written (and re-written) in at least three or four different forms so far and I’m a bit confused as to where it goes now :p

So, I was wondering what I was going to get started on writing next when the idea struck. Well, it literally did since I was in the shower and it hit me on the head like the water coming down from the shower nozzle :p I was simply contemplating a movie that we’d watched and was expanding the story as I normally do when it took a direction which really fits in with my style of writing. So I began thinking further and it all started falling into place – the other characters, the locale and so on and I realized that I could actually place this story in the same universe as "Honest" and "Basement" and that some of the characters who are to be introduced in "Basement" can be used here as well. I’m not sure at the moment as to where in the overall scheme of things this story will be. If it’s going to be a prequel to "Basement" or a sequel but the story itself is taking place pretty well and I’m already into scene two 🙂 So let’s see where this one goes …

It’s the knowing that’s hard …

We watched “Home Delivery” yesterday. It is a Bollywood comedy but it really wasn’t that funny :p It took way too long to set up the characters and their back story and then where it could have been funny, it kind of skipped over the possibilities and simply opted for more boring stuff. It did have some great feel-good moments towards the end but most of the audience (except for us masochists of course :p) would have either turned off the movie or walked out long before that.

Sometimes though, even a bad movie can lead to an epiphany 🙂 As I watched the movie, I began to see similarities between how the movie’s plot evolved (or didn’t evolve) and my novel, “Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog“. The thing is, I’ve not been able to get much feedback on “Honest” or the writing style I use there. When I submit a chapter for critiquing, I get arguments about whether I should have used blaster or credits in there instead of inventing a term. Or I get told that it’s cute but that my humour gets annoying after a while :p Of course, on the other hand, there are others who’ve said that they like the writing.

To be honest, I don’t really let the criticisms or compliments bother me since I know that both are weighted by individual preferences. Sure, if everybody was unanimous in saying that I sucked, then I’d give up writing but so far that hasn’t happened (and that’s not to say it still might not :p). But basically what I’m getting at is that I haven’t used gotten any concrete critiques (except from a couple of people) that I can use to specifically “fix” my novel. But watching “Home Delivery”, I thought maybe my problem was the same as the movies – it sounds good as an overall idea but the execution meanders too much to make a good story :p

I don’t know if that is actually the case or not. Maybe I just haven’t found the right person to submit my work to but any avenue is worth investigating and I feel that my story perhaps has too many characters and too much meandering. So I’m going to use “Home Delivery” as a template of what not to do and then take apart one of my favourite novels to see how things work there. Then I’ll decide how I go on from there – whether “Honest” can stand as it is with a few tweaks or perhaps if I should simply rewrite it to be leaner and meaner 🙂

Wasted time …

I’ve been involved in an online controversy for the past week or so. OK, maybe involved is too strong a word – I’ve been following it keenly. I don’t like taking sides unless I know all the facts in a case and in this case, I didn’t know all the facts. Both sides claimed that they had unrevealed facts and that they couldn’t reveal all the facts just yet. So, I’ve been following things to see how it develops 🙂

Sure, I had my own conclusions (or rather theories) based on what I knew so far and what some of the players said themselves. But that isn’t necessarily proof, right? Of course, that didn’t seem to stop most people from taking sides and defending "their" side or vilifying the other side. The sad thing is, all this brouhaha broke up over a site about creativity, a site aimed at helping writers to hone their skills and their craft. Now, all that energy and all that talent is channeled towards name calling and arguments. A waste of time, or what?

A writer’s main job should be writing. And I hope, that when one writes, it will be something constructive, something useful or something entertaining. Sure, some of these posts are entertaining for a given value of entertainment – just like some people find cockfights or dogfights entertaining :p But I still feel that this energy could have been devoted to something else. We don’t know all the facts, we can’t presume to judge. So why not spend our time creatively rather than fighting others or baiting trolls? But that’s human nature for you – we just don’t know what might be logical. We do the exact opposite :p

Of course, I’m no better since I’ve been spending all my writing time reading this stuff and mentally commenting :p But I’ve decided that enough is enough. The community in question will be revived in its own time. There is not much to be gained by dwelling on what has happened. It is time to simply look to the future and start working on writing again 🙂

Scammers, spammers, agents and reagents

Yes, I’ve been gone for a few days while we moved house and things always seem to happen when I’m gone :p This time, one of my favourite writing forums, Absolute Write (AW), went down and a whole soap opera erupted around the disappearance of the site. Now the thing is, when there is drama of any sort, there springs up all sorts of stories (and versions) based on the drama. This one was no different. Let me try to be objective and present the facts and you can draw your own conclusions :p

It had apparently all started with the SFWA s list of top twenty worst agents – this is a list of scammer agents that writers need to look out for, ones that will rip you off and not actually do anything towards you getting published. Apparently, one of the agents on the list, Barbara Bauer, was offended at the fact that she was mentioned in one of the AW postings and had made a call to AW’s webhost asking that her name (and e-mail address) be removed from the forums. It looks as if Ms. Bauer has been dealing in this kind of intimidation tactics for a while but in the case of AW, the end result was that the site was shut down.

That was when the drama began 🙂 Now keep in mind that I wasn’t there when all this started and so my account of events might not be the true order of events. That said, it looks as if the AW community and friends rose up in outrage at what had happened to the Absolute Write forums. One of the most vocal gatherings on the Net regarding this issue has been this post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden over at Making Light. The AW "community" alleged many things in the process. But first, bear in mind that a "community" is not a single individual but one composed of many individuals with different ideas, opinions and reactions. Personally, I feel that online, a "community" tends to veer towards "mob" at times – just because of the anonymity factor and because the larger, unspeaking portion gets overshadowed by the smaller outspoken ones who say certain things on behalf of the "community" that might not actually be the majority consensus if put to a vote.

Whatever might be the case, hard things were said about both Barbara Bauer and AW’s former web hosts. The twist in the tale here was the fact that one of the owners of the hosting company had been an active member of the AW community and had apparently done a lot to help out with hosting issues, according to this post by her husband/partner. As far as the "community" was concerned, the damning evidence was this post by the lady in question herself. Some took this to mean that she sabotaged AW in order to promote her own writing forums. On the other hand, the only thing said by the owner of AW, Jenna Glatzer, about this whole brouhaha was this. Of course, given that it probably is a legal matter now, you can’t blame her reticence but people being people, this certainly can lead to further speculation and further unfounded allegations.

What do I think? I don’t really know. I try not to be so quick to jump to conclusions ever since Passepartout on the cartoon version of "Around the World in 80 Days" said "Don’t jump to conclusions or the conclusions may jump on you" :p We all mostly like things to be black and white, to know who’s the saint and who’s the sinner. But the problem is that in life, things are never that clear cut. Sometimes we do something with good intentions but it goes downhill or we do something bad but it ends up bringing good results. Without knowing what was in somebody’s heart (and that only the person involved and God would know …), it is difficult to say what a person’s motive for doing something is.

I agree that pulling the forums so quickly and with so little notice was a bad stunt. But then again, from a web hosting perspective (I work for a hosting company) it is not unheard of for hosts to react strongly towards spamming/abuse complaints. On the other hand, that usually happens when the host has no real idea whether the client was spamming or not. In the case of AW, since one of the owners was actively involved with AW, they obviously knew what was going on. So it goes back and forth :p There are things for (and against) each point of view and I cannot sit in judgement. Each person has to make up their own minds as to who might (or might not) have been guilty.

But what we do have to realize is that what has happened has happened. No matter how much of a hue and cry is raised, the fact remains that AW is down for the moment. All that we can hope for is that both AW and its former hosts will be able to work things out amicably and that AW can go back to providing the excellent service that it provided to writers before all this happened. What the writers can gain from this is more awareness of the fact that there are scammers out there who will try to gain your trust and relieve you of the burden of holding on to all that hard earned money :p Above all, keep in mind that the Internet is not always a fair place – sometimes those who do good are the ones who get persecuted and those who persecute others or defraud others get away scot-free …

Undone …

This is something Matt over at Fireflies in the Cloud came up with. (Actually, we are moving today and since I don’t have the time to write a post while in the midst of all the moving, I cheated and wrote the post last night – or it would be last night by the time you read it :p) He wanted people to post the first few lines from two to five unfinished stories that they had on their hard drive. My problem is, I can’t find anything that I can post :p

I don’t actually start stories and leave them unfinished – I’m too obsessive-compulsive for that :p That is, I don’t start writing a story and leave it unfinished. OK, maybe that’s not absolutely true. There is "Basement of the Universe" – my next novel, which I started and did not continue work on but that is only because I’m still working on "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" – the first novel in that sequence 🙂 So, hopefully, I will get back to "Basement" eventually. What I usually do do however, is to jot down an idea for a story or a fragment of a story and never continue with it. So I guess I’m going to post those fragments (and most of them are from around ’95 to ’97). The one exception to that is my first entry but I’ll tell that story after I paste the fragment ..

1. Pascal walked quickly down the rainswept streets of New Colombo. He dodged between the steaming stalls selling flash-fried squid and krill and the vendors hawking their cheap fabrics from Papua. His lanky figure strode with a purposeful feel to it, as if this was a man who had someplace to go, things to do.

2. The scene before Pascal seemed to disappear like a screen-saver at the press of a button. He realised that the holo-dream sequence that he’d been recording had been abruptly terminated but couldn’t for the life of him imagine why. He looked up in irritation from the contoured couch he’d been lying on at Rohit, the man who was going to buy the sequence.

So why’d I paste two fragments? That’s the story behind the story :p Actually, the above fragments are from "Jumpshock". A friend of mine, Afdhel Aziz, and I collaborated on this story at that time. The idea was that he’d write one segment, then I’d write the next and then he’d write another and so on. The first fragment was the opening segment written by Afdhel and the second bit was the part I began writing the story. It was a strange story set in a Colombo of the future. But it went nowhere since Afdhel and I began one-upping each other :p We weren’t working on a single storyline that we’d both agreed upon. Instead, we were simply taking the story where we wanted. He had some sort of a gangster tale in mind and I took it in a different direction by making his story just something that the character was dreaming up as part of a holo-dream sequence – I swear, I had not seen "Strange Days" at that point in time :p Anyway, the back and forth between us to gain control of the story made for some funny moments but not an interesting story … So it kind of just faded away.

However, now that I look at the story, it has some interesting ideas … and some not so interesting ones – mainly mine :p So I might actually want to dust it off and do something with it … I don’t know …

I did look at the other stuff I wanted to post but all of them turned out to be useless since there was nothing to it. They are all just story ideas – not actual beginnings for a story. I’m not even sure I want to use any of those ideas, let alone go posting them on the Net :p

Persimmons

I have recently had several cyclical threads and entries where I posted back to other entries. I don’t particularly like doing that a lot but if unfortunately, here is another one :p This one’s about the Dan Simmons post (I talked previously about this here and here). Hopefully, I will not talk about this particular topic again but since I have contemplated much about Dan Simmons’ motives for his April message and since he promised to reveal all in his May message, I just had to comment on the May message 🙂

Basically, Dan seems to imply that the contents of the April message wasn’t his thoughts (and of course, he wasn’t that kind of person) but that the message was actually him presenting the viewpoints of various other individuals. As an explanation (or excuse) for this method, he goes to quote a few other people (again) saying that the only way to learn is to explore what goes counter to your beliefs. However, what struck me most about the whole message was the fact that Dan does not actually say what he thinks or feels or believes – he simply parrots other people (taking extracts from other works to supplement his message) and so seems to be saying, this is what others think. However, whether he’s actually asking people to make up their own minds, or is trying to make up their minds for them, remains slightly unclear.

One thing that does emerge as you read between the lines though, is that Dan Simmons has already made up his mind :p Dan Simmons, like so many others, seems to be convinced that there is an "Islamic" threat (or possibility of one). Sure, he throws around a few modifiers such as jihadists or Wahabbists from time to time but it is clear from the inferences he draws that he believes that Islam as a religion is aimed at sowing war and terror on the "infidels". He goes on to quote several verses from the Qur’an to support his point of view. What he forgets (and what most militant Muslims forget – or ignore for their own warped purposes) is that while the word is often translated as "infidel", what it actually means is "non-believer". It doesn’t sound as bad when you shout "Death to the non-believers!" though, does it? :p

I believe that the Qur’an is the word of God, given to his prophet – but that has nothing to do with this discussion. What is pertinent however, is that the chapters of the Qur’an were not revealed all at once. They were revealed at different times to deal with different situations. When a verse talks about "non-believers", it often as not is talking about *Arab* non-believers at that time as not. But of course, today, people twist it around (especially in translation since a word can have many different shades of meaning and the translator gets to pick which shade they want, even though that might differ from the original intent) and say it says "death to infidels" and that means Jews and Christians!

I am not trying to be an apologist for the terrorists who kill innocents in the name of Islam. That is wrong and there are no two sides to that. But what I do want to stress is the fact that though these people might call themselves Muslims, by the core beliefs of Islam, they are not really Muslims. So this is not an issue of Islam against the rest of the world or against the West but about human stupidity, greed, fear and prejudice against other humans. The biggest concern I have about Dan’s message is the fact that he is quick to label things. He labels the West as life-affirming and all of Islam (or most of it) as evil. This is fine and dandy if we lived in a rational world where people made up their minds by thinking about things logically. But no, we live in a world where people go about shooting people in turbans (no matter what their religion or nationality) because they might be Muslims – and mind you, this happened in the "life affirming" West :p

There are other things which are even worse which happens in the life affirming West that Dan ignores. But my point is not that the West is bad or that a country is bad or that a religion is bad – they are not. The problem is that people are not rational. They like to put labels like "us" and "them" on things because it makes it easy to know who to cheer and who to hate. When somebody who is supposed to know better (like the Islamic clerics that Dan talks about) comes along and tells them all these big name authors say that Islam is bad and that they are going to wipe us out, do you honestly believe that most of the people who read Dan’s message are going to stop to actually think if all of that makes logical sense? Or are they going to start hating something that they don’t even totally understand? Hating what we don’t know, we’ve never done that before, have we? :p

If you’re a writer, you should think about what you’re going to write. Perhaps try to present a balanced perspective. If you write a story and it sounds like vitriol, maybe you shouldn’t try to defend it by saying that before the World Wars, an anti-German story would have sounded like vitriol too. That you’re just pushing the envelope. If you’re a writer, you know that there is also something called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, Dan says at the beginning of his May message that if you’re expecting polemics, apologetics, politics or reinforcements of your own prejudices, that you would be disappointed because his was a writer’s website. But then again, I thought a writer’s job was to write about what he feels – not what others think. But that’s probably just me :p

Where the writing flows …

I’ve been doing quite a bit of editing these past couple of days. It is mostly inspired (and instigated) by my new crit pal 🙂 I haven’t actually gotten that many critiques of my work – partially because I haven’t been able to find good (and reliable) beta readers but also because I don’t have the time to give back to a crit group. I hate joining a crit group and then not putting in enough effort but just coasting along so that I can get my own stuff critted. That seems somehow dishonest.

But I digress. Working one on one with another writer can be really helpful. I’ve gotten feedback on what works and what doesn’t work with "Honest" and thinking about it, I realized that the opening chapter (the one which is currently up on my site :p) is too long. I spend too much time on two characters and then completely forget them for several chapters as I introduce more new characters. I decided to see if it would work better by cutting the first chapter into several different chapters (or scenes) and interspersing the introduction of the other characters in between. It seems to work (to me) but what do I know? :p

I also got another rejection early in the morning today 🙂 This is the second rejection in about a week for this short story. This is actually from one of the few places which usually gives feedback on their rejections but this time, the rejection didn’t prove to be very helpful. It said, "Intriguing as this is, it moves awfully slowly – I’m not sure if it’s just the pacing, or the excessive exposition. The footnotes are amusing, for a while, and then become a little annoying, too – I suggest using them judiciously, if at all." It’s not very helpful when they aren’t sure why the story moves slowly – at least, for me. I’m kind of wondering if I should give up on the short stories and simply take the time to work on my novels. Or if I should put writing on hold for a while and get back to coding …. Guess I’ll figure it out 🙂

Rejections and reflections

I received another rejection day-before-yesterday – this time for one of my short stories. I had submitted my story, The Wyrm’s Lair, to Orson Scott Card’s Integalactic Medicine Show. I am not worried about the rejection – rejections are bound to come – but the way the rejection was given surprises me a bit. First of all, though the magazine has a website, the rejection came from a Yahoo address :p Secondly, they are supposed to respond to submissions in three months and the rejection came right on the dot on the final day of the three month period. The my paranoid side can’t help but wonder if perhaps they ever read the submission or they simply reject everything that has been with them for three months?

This paranoia is reinforced by point number three – there was no reason given, no critique of the story. It simply stated, "we can’t use it, you can submit it elsewhere now". To be honest, I’m disappointed with Orson Scott Card :p Of course to be even more honest, I’ve never read any Orson Scott Card :p He’s one of those authors that I’ve been meaning to read since I first saw one of his books on a library shelf way back in 1989. But I’ve never done so because either I never find any of his books at the bookstore or I find part of a series and never the whole series. But still, I expected a magazine run by somebody of his calibre would at least give you a few pointers when they rejected your submission.

I grew up reading about Hugo Gernsback and "scientifiction", about authors of the calibre of John W. Campbell, Horace L. Gold, Lester Del Rey and Anthony Boucher who would spend hours discussing stories with their writers and who even when they rejected a story, inspired the writer to do better. When I started writing and submitting myself, I expected something like that. But I guess I’m forgetting the fact that the world has moved on. That everybody is in a hurry, that everything moves much faster now. I have made hundreds of queries and a few submissions over the last year or so. Most of those have been met with a rejection without any explanation. Of the handful of submissions I’ve made, I’ve received one rejection where they actually took the time to analyze stuff. Everybody else used meaningless and pat phrases like "not right for me", "I can’t get enthusiastic about it" or "too busy" to get out of actually giving their honest opinion.

Is it just that the world has become so PC that nobody wants to offend anybody else? Or just that everybody is so busy that they can’t be bothered to sit down and write down their opinion? Or worse yet, that nobody has an opinion anymore? :p