The way I see it …

I know I said I won’t do it but I’ve started editing "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" again 🙂 It all started like this: I came across a crit group where the crits were individual. You select somebody that you think will suit your requirements as to what you’re looking for in a crit partner and you pair up with them. They crit your stuff and you crit theirs. If it doesn’t work out, you move on and find another partner and so on.

Except for Laurie going through the book several times, "Honest" has not had any full crits done on it. Yes, I’m already submitting the book to agents but I can’t but help feeling that perhaps there are things that could be improved upon :p So, I’ve been thinking of getting into a crit group but the biggest issue with that is time. I don’t have enough time to devote to a full crit group where you’d be critting the works of several others in return for them critting your work. However, a one-on-one crit is much more manageable for me in terms of time. Besides, the person I picked turned out to have just as many time constraints as I do :p So we both know that the crits will not be lightning-fast but that they will get there.

We’ve exchanged our first chapters and critted them and I like what I’ve read as well as the crit I’ve received so far. It has been very helpful in pointing out an area that I’ve always had trouble with – point of view (POV). When I write, I simply write. I don’t worry about head-hopping, about switching POV in mid-scene etc. This worked fine for non-fiction where I didn’t have to worry about this kind of stuff but when you’re writing fiction, this is something that you have to be very careful about :p

I do think that I managed to get the POV stuff under control by my second or third edit – whichever the last one was. But it still wasn’t perfect. The problem has been the fact that I’m confused as to how POV works :p I think that if it is third-person limited POV, then everything has to be described through the POV character’s eyes. You can’t state anything that is supposition as fact. While strictly speaking this might be true, it tends to lead to rather lengthy sentences with "appeared to", "seemed to" or "as if" being included in them a lot 🙂

So I went back to basics. I took up a few Pratchetts – I consider him to be my virtual guru. Besides, my style is pretty similar to his and so it made sense to look at his books for POV advice 🙂 After reading a few excerpts from "Small Gods", "Night Watch" and "Going Postal", I had a much clearer view of how I should handle point of view :p Of course, PTerry does do some head hopping in "Small Gods" and that is supposed to be a no-no but then again, he’s a master! Me, I’m still not published and so I don’t think I should become that ambitious. But I did go ahead and dropped the "seemed", "appeared" and so on from my narrative and it actually seems to read much better :p

The perfect query

As I’ve mentioned before, query letters are pretty important in the process of getting published – unless you want to self-publish or happen to have a rich uncle who owns a publishing house that is :p The problem of course, is crafting the perfect query letter.

After my adventures mentioned in the earlier entry with streamlining and pruning my query letter, I thought I had it down pat. That I had my query down to the essentials, that it was concise and that it flowed well and that that was all I needed. However, I have since come to realize maybe that wasn’t enough 🙂 (But it never is, is it? :p)

Somewhere on one of the writing forums I frequent, (probably Absolute Write Water Cooler …) there was a thread about how sending a sample of your writing along with the query was important. I had not considered this originally. My reasoning was, that if they wanted a sample of my writing, they’d ask for it, right? Wrong! Most of the agents do not seem to ask for a sample in their submission guidelines but of course, if they had something that would help them to gauge your writing, it certainly would help, wouldn’t it?

So, I’ve started including the first chapter of my novel in text format in the body of the query e-mail now. (In this day and age of mass-scale viruses, attachments are a no-no … unless they ask for them :p) If the agent asks for a certain number or pages or chapters in their submission guidelines, then I cut it down to that length. Otherwise, I include the first chapter.

Of course, its too early at the moment to say if this tactic is paying off or not but one of the recent queries that I sent actually got a two line reason as to the rejection (they didn’t think that they did well representing humorous fiction) than the usual form rejection of "Sorry, we’re not interested". So maybe it’s working. Of course, the question is, is it working for me or against me? :p

Wordsmithing tools of the trade

I am in the process of setting up a new notebook computer and so have had to re-install all of the software tools that I use on a day to day basis. In hte process, I came to realize just how many tools that I use quite frequently for writing 🙂

If we take things sequentially, I started the morning yesterday by using Blog, one of my own apps, to write this blog. Then, I received a rejection for a query that I’d sent out via e-mail (let’s not even get into e-mail and web browsers in the writing process :p) and so had to fire up another one of my apps, WriteTrack, to enter the rejection into my tracking database. I then installed MindManager since all of my story ideas are mind mapped so that I can keep track of the connections between different stories and also keep different sections of a single story – such as characters, locations, history etc. – connected.

Towards mid-day, I started installing Office 2003 since I needed to start working on again on my latest short story and all my works in progress are in Word format. There was a time I used my own editor (which saved everything in RTF format) for my writing but overall, I prefer Word since it has all the features I want and it gives me more time to write since I don’t have to spend my time coding a new feature in to my editor :p

After work, I did some editing and realized that some of my other writing tools were missing 🙂 So I installed WordWeb and Visual Thesaurus. I’ve been using both of these tools for a long time now. They are great for looking up words and for making associations between different words. I have WordWeb running from my system tray and since it will give you the definition for any word highlighted in the current windows with a simple hotkey combination, I use it to check my spelling (or to see which variation of spelling is correct if I’m confused as to if I’m using American or British spelling) and to play all those scrambled word games 🙂 Visual Thesaurus comes out when I need to do $more heavy duty work – such as find a non-adverb replacement for a word or find a suitable alternative for an oft used word.

The above are just the day to day tools that I use all the time. There are others which are not so often used (and which I have not yet installed on my computer). There’s PlotCraft, another one of my own creations, which I use to keep track of story ideas and quotations. Then there’s TheSage – another interesting dictionary and thesaurus which is absolutely free! Sequence Publishing, the people who developed TheSage, also have a couple of other writing tools which are worth taking a look at too!

This is just the tip of the ice berg. There are a lot more tools out there (both free and for a fee) which can help you write better or to organize your writing process. Sometimes, I feel that I spend more time looking at tools than actually writing :p However, it is undeniable that the correct combination of tools does help you, if writing is your craft 🙂

Round and round it goes …

The whole thread of searches and information found in the process from that original reference to Asoka in my blog has been somewhat fascinating 🙂 First, it led to the Nine Unknown Men and now it’s led me by way of yesterday’s entry (which referenced Philip Jose Farmer) to the Wold Newton family :p

Yes, I know, you’re probably bursting with curiosity by this time to learn what the Wold Newton family is (yeah, right :p) but let me sidetrack for a moment (and if you’re really impatient, you can go follow the link above and come back here later :p). I have read Farmer’s "The Other Log of Phileas Fogg" a long time ago and was fascinated by it. I liked the alternate story behind Verne‘s "Around the World in 80 Days" and how deftly Farmer wove in and out of the story written by Verne. I’ve also read quite a bit of other stuff by Farmer and have been fascinated by his alternate takes on fictional characters. However, I had not been aware of his theory/history about the Wold Newton family and how they encompass a lot of different fictional heroes from all areas of fiction.

I’ve always been fascinated by family trees and grand sweeping sagas which span decades (if not centuries or millennia) and paint a majestic mural of dashing individuals on the canvas of time 🙂 (Woah, talk about wordy sentences :p) I’ve only attempted one such story myself and that was a long time ago. It could almost be called my first "real" story. It was about a family named Forman who left Earth to colonize a planet circling a star in the Sagittarius system. It had the grand sounding title of "The Sagittarian Saga". Initially, the story was just about the Forman family on the new planet after centuries of being there but later, I began adding more family members and more history. There was the story of Professor William Forman, the founder of the Forman clan and then Jano Forman, who actually discovered the means to leave Earth and so on.

Now that I think about it, perhaps Farmer (and a few other writers who liked to link things together) influenced me unconsciously when I wrote these stories (never mind the fact that I hadn’t read Farmer when I originally started the stories :p But the history is a bit vague in my mind and I might have gotten to Farmer by the time I started adding to the history of the Forman family …) I know for a fact that my later reading of the greatest linker of totally-unrelated-and-disparate facts, Terry Pratchett, has certainly influenced my style of writing these days. So perhaps, Farmer did too. And perhaps, I owe him a debt of gratitude 🙂

Where do they come from?

I guess one question that a writer gets asked often is "where do your ideas come from?". To be honest, I’ve never been asked this question though I’m told that other writers do get asked this question often. Of course, this might be just an indication that not many think that my ideas are that spectacular :p Or it might simply be that they can already see where my ideas came from 🙂 I have no idea.

Anyway, I’ve not been writing much lately. There have been way too many things to do that were not writing related. There’s family stuff going on post-wedding (I think I mentioned that my brother got married, right? :p), I’m having hardware trouble and a friend of mine is in the process of moving servers and I’m helping him out. What with all this going on, I haven’t had time to concentrate on the writing.

I did finish my last short story and it still needs editing but now it’s time to start work on something new – as soon as I get done with the editing on the short story. I know there are many writers who have hundreds (if not thousands) of story ideas crammed in their heads – or in their handy, dandy notebook :p I used to be like that. I would jot down ideas all over the place so that I could write a story about it someday. I stopped doing that years ago because the ideas keep coming and trying to write stories based on all of those ideas would be an impossible task. However, given that I’m obsessive-compulsive, I’d probably try to write a story for each and every idea and that would have been something to see – me trying to keep up with myself :p

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about that 🙂 Now what I do is simply wait for something to come up when I want to write a new story. Sure, I do have a few ideas in back burner. Most of these however are the for the series of novels that I’m writing. Not short stories. So we were watching a collection of Hindi songs and I saw this one song from "Asoka" which affected me greatly at this particular moment. It wasn’t so much the song as the back story, which I was already aware of, and the location, which was isolated, beautiful and somehow heartbreaking in that particular context. That moment, believe it or not, gave me my next story idea 🙂 The story as it has evolved so far in my mind has nothing to do with Asoka directly, and once it is done, might not even have a link as to its origins. I don’t know how it will develop once I start writing it. But it all began with a song 🙂

Writing, perceptions and consequences

I was actually going to write about something completely different today but I came across this thing yesterday and it has been bothering/nagging me since then. So I decided to blog about this instead :p

I wrote about Dan Simmons’ April message a few days ago. Yesterday I went over to Dan Simmons’ site for some reason and was surprised to discover that the April message was gone. The folder that the message was in is intact but his whole news folder simply shows a directory listing instead of the default page. (You can find a copy of the original message here if you’ve not read it and have no idea what I’m talking about :p) I was curious as to what had happened. Was this enemy action by somebody who did not like the message? Or did Dan take it down himself because of all the negative response to the message? What had been the original intention of the message in the first place? Was it an April Fool’s joke gone wrong or was he serious? Being the kind of cat that curiosity certainly would enjoy killing, I went over to Dan Simmons’ forums.

Now bear in mind that Dan’s site was not defaced in any way. The new folder itself was there as well as some other subfolders under it but the April message (as well as all other messages by Dan it seems) were missing. However, on the forums, the opinion seemed to strongly suggest that this was some nefarious deed by the "jihadists" (as one forum user called them) and not many seem to think that Dan Simmons himself might have pulled it. Granted, I don’t know enough about Dan Simmons to make a guess and these people probably do seem to know him best but given the circumstances, I do wish that people wouldn’t be so prone to jump to conclusions. But that’s people for you :p

I really have no idea what happened and I hate to make sweeping assumptions without knowing all the facts. So I will just file this under interesting and weird :p If anybody learns what did happen, do let me know 🙂 Incidentally, David Brin has a comment about the Dan Simmons message on his own blog and while I haven’t read them yet, I hear that the reader comments are interesting …

Chrononaut chronicles

Yesterday while meandering through the web, I came across a message from writer Dan Simmons. Apparently, Dan Writes a message to his fans every once in a while but this one seemed to be slightly darker in tone. I say "seemed" because I know nothing of Dan’s politics nor his intentions. All that was there on the site was a rather bleak message which seemed to hint at total annihilation as the only possible solution to the "Islamic menace".

I was originally going to post a message about writers and their responsibility to their readership here. About how whatever we write and how we ourselves mean it, that it could be taken a completely different way by somebody else. Dan’s message could have been a satire along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s "A Modest Proposal". Or it could have been an April Fool’s joke with the traveller’s final three words being "Happy April Fools!" :p But I cannot know what Dan Simmons intended. All I have are the words on the website and how the words themselves are interpreted.

The words on the page sent me off on another hunt. Or rather, one word – "dhimmi". I am a Muslim but I had not heard this word before. And yet, supposedly this was a word which had great meaning to Muslims. I looked at Wikipedia and found an article that had its neutrality and factual accuracy questioned. I searched Google and came across hundreds of thousands of pages but the interesting thing was that most of the pages seemed to be by non-Muslims on the topic. The only Muslim site on the first two pages that I found was Islamic propaganda rather than an impartial article – I wasn’t interested in propaganda. I wanted the true account of things and the more I searched, less I found in the way of truth. Opinions, sure. Conjecture, yes. But facts were scarce.

I then went on Dan Simmons’ forums to see what the regulars there had to say. I saw a whole bunch of people saying that Islam was a militant religion, that nobody wished Muslims ill but if things came to that, they’d beat the Muslims down "out of need". Truth be told, there were those who opposed this point of view as well but it seemed as if that was the minority. Now I’m a Muslim. I’ve never wished ill upon Christians or Jews or people of any other religion. I believe that God lets us choose our own path and whether we choose good or bad depends on us – not our religion. After all my web browsing, I feel a great weariness, a sadness. Why can’t people see that the issue is not with different religions or ideologies but with people?

I am not angry at the people who will not see the wrongs on their own side as people of a particular nation or people belonging to a particular religion. But I do feel anger at our own stupidity, arrogance and blindness. We always believe that somehow "we" are right and that "they" are wrong. We keep finding a new "us" and a "them". It’s as if all humanity can do is break into ever smaller groups and keep fighting each other till we dwindle away into nothingness. Is that our fate?

Creature comforts

I was trying to remember a creature that was mentioned in an old Alfred Hitchcock horror anthology for a short story I am working on at the moment. I like to litter my stories with references to other characters, events, places etc. and this half remembered story about a guy who is pursued by a creature (or was it a family of creatures?) who can only be seen as movement from the corner of your eyes seemed strangely apt for this particular story. Only trouble was, all that I can remember is that the story was from an anthology which might have been called "Stories That Scared Even Me". That anthology name is correct since I looked it up but I couldn’t find the story in the table of contents for that anthology – at least, I didn’t find a name that rang a bell 🙁

Since I couldn’t find the exact creature I wanted, I decided to widen my search and simply look up mythological creatures in the hope of hitting upon the same creature while searching from a different angle. I didn’t succeed there either but I did dig up a lot of information on something that had interested me a lot in days gone by – cryptozoology. In case you’re not aware of it, cryptozoology is the study of animals which are presumed to exist but for which there is no conclusive proof of existence. This also covers animals which are believed to be extinct but the presence of which is sometimes reported even now. The creatures studied under cryptozoology are referred to as cryptids. Some of the more famous cryptids are the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

The problem with cryptozoology has always been the lack of conclusive evidence and the human tendency to believe in anything fantastic. It’s strange but we’ll grab on to a fantastic story about a lost humanoid race skulking around in the jungle much more readily than we’d believe that somebody might be duping us to think that there is such a race. Of course, given that there isn’t enough evidence to conclude one way or another, I guess the best course of action would be to keep an open mind. The world we live in is a strange and wonderful place and as the not so sensational areas of cryptozoology has sometimes proven, there are still creatures in existence that we thought had long perished or we knew nothing about. But does that mean that the Loch Ness Monster is real? I really don’t know …

Styling suggestions

After I wrote the post for yesterday, I realized that that particular post wasn’t going to help anybody except for those who are already familiar with Word. Since the whole point was about using Word effectively as a writer, I wrote another entry about how to use styles in Word to make your life easier for a writers’ forum that I’m involved in. I’m having a bit of a lazy day by posting that entry back here :p (Just remember that I was working with Word 2003 when I wrote the following and the same features/menu options might not be there in your version of Word)

One of the most important things to keep in mind in working with a Word document is to use custom formatting sparsely. What do I mean by custom formatting? I mean taking a line and increasing the font size and making it bold when you want a title or a heading. Instead, use the built-in styles in Word. How do you do this? Simply select the style you want from the Style Selector on your toolbar. What’s the advantage in doing it this way? If you want to change how your document headings or chapter headings look later, you only have one change to make instead of hunting for each chapter or section heading and modifying it individually – seriously 🙂

So how do you change a document heading later if you have used styles? Easy. Use the Styles and Formatting Pane. If you don’t have the Styles Pane open, you can show it by clicking Styles and Formatting … under the Format menu in Word. Once you have the pane open, select the style you want and you will note a little downward arrow next to the style name, click on it and you’ll get a menu. On that menu, you’ll see an item named "Modify …" – that’s the one you want. Simply modify the style and it will be automatically applied to all instances on the current document. Easy or what? 🙂

One particular use for this feature that I can think of is for italicised text. Some manuscript guidelines say that you should underline text in italics because italics don’t show up well. All you have to do is select "Italic" from the Style Pane, Modify it and add underlining. Have another agent/publisher who wants no underlines for italics? No problem, go there again, modify, remove underline! All it takes is a few seconds 🙂

That’s not all. You can see how many places you use a specific style. Yes, that doesn’t sound very useful but there will be times when you’ll actually want to know :p If you select a style and drop down the menu again, you’ll see that at the top of the menu it says Select All: Not Currently Used or Select All x instance(s). This basically lets you figure out how many times a certain style is used and also to select all instances of the style used on your document for further modifications.

The writer’s tools

They say that a good craftsman does not blame his tools. I would think it would be just as important for a good craftsman to know his/her tools 🙂 The sad thing is, that most writers don’t seem to think this is important. Take for instance your humble Word, the word processor of choice (or necessity) for most writers. Everybody and their grandmother seems to use Word, but how many use it effectively?

There are many resources online (free ones at that) which help you learn more about Word. But people either don’t know about them or think that they don’t need to know how to effectively use the program. Or, they are not aware that they are not effectively using Word. Take for instance this tip – it was displayed on the Word page I linked to above. It gives a lot of valuable information on formatting sections. But how many people take the time to read it? Then there’s the Crabby Office Lady, Office Tips & Tricks and the Microsoft Office Training site all of which have a lot of free information and advice that would be useful to Word users.

It was at one of these sites (I forget which) where I learnt about the top ten tips for working with Word documents. It was a live video training session and I would just like to list the top 10 tips just in case they are of any help to somebody else.

1. Macros are a great time saver. You can easily record a macro to repeat a common task. Simply start the macro recorder and do what you need to do in Word. If you take some time to edit the recorded macro, you can take the power of the macros to a whole new level.
2. Create and edit field codes directly – you can type in a field code and then select it and press CTRL+F9 to create a field and then F9 to update it. You can use ALT+F9 to show field codes.
3. Use Open & Repair. If your Word document becomes corrupted, you can use the Open & Repair option to correct the document. The Word Open dialog has a drop down arrow next to the Open button – this allows you to select other Open options such as Open & Repair.
4. Find & Replace is not just for words. You can use Find & Replace to find (and replace) special characters like a paragraph markers, formatting, styles or for specific text patterns.
5. Sections. Word stores all of the formatting for your current section in the next section break except for the type of the section break – that is saved in the next section break. If you are aware of this, it helps you to understand a lot of the quirks of Word.
6. Use tables to simplify complex documents since they allow you to layout your document just the way you want using tables.
7. The styles and formatting pane – this pane allows you to select all instances using a specific style and to modify them all in one go. It also lets you see which styles are used and which aren’t in the current document.
8. Use the ALT key when dragging anything on the ruler – this allows much better control and shows on-screen guides.
9. Keyboard shortcuts – they make your life so much easier. CTRL+SHIFT+C and CTRL+SHIFT+V are much more powerful format painters than the toolbar button; F4 repeats the last action; CTRL+Q clears paragraph formatting; CTRL+SPACE clears character formatting.
10. Take advantage of what the Word environment offers – use zoom, compare, revision tracking, the different view options, reveal formatting, the object browser etc. to make your life easier. Learn about each of these features.