Time to write again …

I’ve gone through all three of my currently active software projects and done releases for all of them, I’ve also got a software project on back burner which I won’t be able to totally test till Office 2007 comes out :p (No, it’s not Office 2007 specific but it’s a Word add-in and I might as well make sure that it works with the latest release of Office since it’s just around the corner – at least the public beta … or so they say :p)

Be that as may be, I think I’ve done enough coding for a while. Now it’s time to get back to the writing. The problem, as always, is lethargy. I seem to need to build momentum to get going on any project. I procrastinated on the next release of Blog for the longest time because I just couldn’t build up the enthusiasm to get started on coding again. Once I got going, I couldn’t stop :p Now that I’m in full-blown coding mode, I find myself unable to put aside coding and go back to writing. But I must. Otherwise, the writing will just atrophy till I get back into it months from now and I don’t want that to happen.

The issue is always getting started. Once things get going – it’s all downhill from that point on. I know what I want to write next. I have a story (or at least a world) in my head. This one is rather a vibrant world as well – I keep getting images about the world, the society that I want to write about. But I keep putting it off, thinking that I should wait for word on the last short story that I submitted or that I should try to get some more submissions going or something. If I would actually do something writing related – even as simple as submitting stuff to agents or publishers – I think it would be fine. It’s this sitting around and waiting that I just can’t abide …

Coding, Testing, Writing – Life goes on …

I finally finished editing my new short story, "The Wyrm’s Lair" and sent it out. I haven’t really tried submitting short stories anywhere before (heck, I only started submitting my novel less than a year ago :p) and so am not sure how it will go – keep good thoughts in mind for it 🙂 Of course, I’m not totally accurate in saying I haven’t submitted any short stories before – I have submitted two stories before. One, a long time ago to an e-mag and they didn’t like it and the other one was just before I started work on the short story that I sent out today. The second one was rejected as well but I’m not totally surprised about that one since that didn’t have too much action – it was more of a character/mood piece. This one, I really like and it sort of came together much better even than the first draft once I’d edited it. However, it might not be everybody’s cup of tea :p So now that that’s done, I have to consider what I start working on next. Probably editing "Honest" …

I’m also beta testing AstroSynthesis. AS is probably one of the best space mapping software out there 🙂 I love it because it helps me to map out the universe that I’m writing about. It fleshes things out and helps me keep track of what world is where and how far away each world is and so on. Now if I could take it a step further and I could also map out each planet as far as the land masses and stuff goes, it would be perfect. Actually AS has a sister product, Fractal Mapper which does help you do this but it takes quite a bit of work to create a good looking Fractal Mapper map and I just don’t have the patience :p Besides, I already have enough projects without taking any more on. But back to topic, I am beta testing AS 2.0 and I was really thrilled to be picked to beta test since besides my own apps, I haven’t beta tested anything much. Of course, what with all the other stuff going on, I haven’t been able to do as thorough a beta test as I would have liked and I feel a bit guilty about this since the developer is sort of getting cheated by having me beta test. Hopefully, I can make up for it in the future beta releases.

Now that WriteTrack is out, I have started work on another project – a Word add-in to highlight often used (and misused) words in a document. I’ve already written most of the code for this as a macro and so the logic isn’t too difficult but there is a UI to the add-in and that’s where I’m struggling at the moment. I hope to have the add-in done within a week and then I hope to keep adding more functionality to it as I go on, creating a suite of little utilities that will be helpful to writers. That’s something I see a great need for with Word – it’s not too shabby a word processor but most of the available tools are just as overpriced as Word is :p We need more free stuff so that us poor writers can actually afford to have them 🙂

And to summarize ….

This week’s been rather eventful … and it’s only beginning :p Actually, I guess I’m talking about last week. But given the fact that I only have a tenuous concept of time at any given moment, I might actually be talking about Sunday-after-next and still might not really have an inkling about what I’m really talking about :p Incidentally, I’m one of those people who believes that the week begins on Monday and so, I guess this is a new week. The past week had a lot of things going on and so I thought I’d do a recap here.

I finished my latest short story … either yesterday or day before. Strangely enough, it actually was fun writing it after I got going and wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be :p I kind of like how the world I built in that story turned out but not sure if others will think so. I want to try and submit this story to a couple of places but first, it needs a little bit more polishing. Laurie’s going through it first (and I need a bit of a break from it) and then I will go back to working on it.

I also started work on WriteTrack again. This was actually due to something else I finished this week – a new query letter. I submitted my query letter over at Absolute Write Water Cooler – a good forum for writers BTW – and they (or actually one really helpful person :p) tore it apart and re-built it from the ground up. I like how the new query letter turned out and couldn’t wait to get querying again :p So, I sent out a couple of queries using the new query letter and that meant that I had to track the new queries using WriteTrack :p I got to work originally to fix a few minor annoyances but then it turned into more serious work where I actually added in the last of the missing functionality in WriteTrack, fixed a few bugs, added suggested features by beta-testers and so on. I still have a few minor UI issues to sort out but once that’s done, a new build should be ready to go out … maybe today 🙂

The letter that queries …

I’ve been sending out query letters to over 70 agents in the last year or so. I just learnt that I’ve been doing it all wrong 🙁 We’d worked on the query letter and polished it and reworked it till we were sure that it was OK. But what we neglected to do was get a second opinion and that proved to be fatal. Somewhere along the way, in between all the reading on how to do an effective query letter and how to do a great synopsis, I seem to have got things muddled. Instead of writing a query letter, I’d been trying to write a query letter with an embedded synopsis. This was finally pointed out to me yesterday when I submitted my query letter for critting :p

Most online resource on query letters says to stick to about one page in length and to stick with three paragraphs – the first an introduction giving your title, genre, word count etc., the second details about your story and the third a description of yourself and your qualifications. Mine ran to four paragraphs I think and two of those were devoted to the story and yet, I didn’t do too good a job of it – as was pointed out to me 🙂 I thought that the whole story, both the beginning and the ending, had to be there. But it turns out that what I should have done was provide a teaser. Describe how the story starts and get them hooked but not go beyond that point. If they want to know more, then they can ask for a partial or the full manuscript. Simple, and yet apparently so easy to overlook.

My revised query letter turned out to be only two paragraphs since the first paragraph with the book title, genre and word count turned out to be a single sentence :p I merged that with the second paragraph detailing the story and came up with a much, much shorter two paragraph query. This time however, I’m going to get it critted before I try submitting to anybody else :p

What’s your style?

The above is a question that I find myself grappling with now that I’ve started on a short story. For the longest time, I could not write anything because I didn’t seem to have my own voice, my own style. The standard narrative style seemed just too bland for me but that’s about all that I seemed to be able to manage when I thought of writing something. Then I wrote my first novel and I found my voice.

I discovered that a dry, humorous style of narration is what suited me best. I’d used a variation on this during my days of writing non-fiction for newspapers. I used to have a self-deprecating/self-insulting style which poked fun at my own pronouncements and the readers seemed to love it 🙂 So, I was simply going back to the same roots and this seemed the right place to be. Of course, there were the inevitable comparisons with Terry Pratchett. Now, I didn’t want to be called just another Pratchett imitator, trying to cash in on what I perceived to be a good market. That wasn’t my intention at all. That just happened to be the style I wrote in and I’d written that way (at least for non-fiction) long before I discovered Terry. But that’s beside the point …

The real point is that I wrote my first novel and it had a fairly consistent voice. It was dryly humorous all the way through. Then I sat down to write my second novel and I wasn’t sure that I could pull it off a second time. Could I be that humorous a second time? Could I find ways not to have the same old jokes again? Could I even remember which jokes had been used where? I wasn’t too sure anymore. Of course, I got through only about 2-3 pages of the second novel before I put that away to write the short stories but I wasn’t really happy with the tone of the second novel. It didn’t have the same kind of easy flow as the rest – something was missing.

Now the short stories, they don’t have much humour at all. I am excited about the one I’m writing at the moment because I feel that the world the story is set in has potential and that I can do a whole bunch of stories set in that world. But does it have the same style as the novel? Not at all. This one’s straight story telling – more Asimov than Pratchett. So I find myself wondering again, what is my style?

Where the muse takes you …

Suddenly, I seem to be up to my neck in short stories :p I had wanted to get the latest revision of "Honest" done quickly but I’ve only gotten through the first chapter. While I do want to finish that, I feel the urge to work on this particular short story more.

When I dusted out my old short stories, I selected three stories as sort of in a state of readiness. Two were complete stories and the other was a fragment that I’d started to write but lost steam on. Laurie reckons that of the two complete ones, that one could be submitted. That was the last short story I had done – it was written about five or six years ago and was called "Dad is Gone". Not really one of my favourites but then again, it’s not really something with a lot of action – it more of a mood/character piece. I just like the setting, which was one of the first really detailed worlds I created, and the character. However, since that’s the one which is most close to being submission-worthy, Laurie is working on editing it and once she’s done, I guess I’ll go through it again and then try submitting that one to a few places.

The second complete story is a short, short – less than a 1000 words. It’s a really rambling, morbid piece which has prompted a couple of people to ask me if I’d ever considered suicide :p No, not because the writing was so bad, but because the narrator is kind of obsessed with death. Again, not really something I actually like except for sentimental value – it was the first short story that I ever completed – and the final line, I love that line 🙂 Will I try submitting it? I don’t know.

The third one – I’d named it "Big Brother Lives" but am going to change the title since that particular title makes no sense – is a different kettle of fish. I didn’t have any real affinity to the story as it was when I read it. However, as I began editing it and reworking it, I began to re-imagine the world the story takes place in and I like how the new world is turning out. It has possibilities. I am not very familiar with today’s science fiction (I mostly read golden age stuff …) and so, don’t know if this kind of thing has been done before. Considering the subject matter and the direction I’m taking, I think it probably has. But still, I feel good about this particular story … Let’s see how it goes …

The long and the short of it …

There used to be a time when all I wanted to write were short stories. I had ideas written away on a million scraps of paper and stored on many different files scattered across my hard drive. I didn’t think I was capable of writing a novel because I didn’t think that I could come up with a plot that could span the length of an entire novel. Then, I wrote my first novel a year or so ago :p

Now, I don’t think I can write a short story 🙂 I have plenty of ideas for novels now. In fact, my current story line spans 7 novels at the moment. But a short story? Oh no! I don’t think I can do it because I don’t know I can tell a good story at that length. Some of my scenes take around 8-10 pages and a short story could be done in about 3 of my scenes! Or, that was my excuse till yesterday.

Yesterday, I dusted out one of my old short stories and took a look at it. I could certainly see where it needed work. I could also see how green I’d been and how much work the story needed in certain terms. I had about 4 pages of story and I sat down with the intention of writing a short story of about 35 pages. Horror of horrors! I suddenly discovered that I didn’t seem to know what to write and how to fill up 35 pages. Here I had been claiming that I could do a 350 page novel with no problems at all and there I was, stuck on a 35 page short story :p So in the end, I guess the length does not matter. In either format, you could get stuck just as easily or you could stop worrying about the length and just write the story and see where it takes you. I think that’s what I’ll do – try telling the story and see where the story takes me. It worked for me with a novel, so why not a short story? 🙂

Writing tools and writing writing tools :p

It’s something that has bugged me for a while – there just aren’t good writing tools around. Sure, you have Word or any of the other garden variety word processing software out there. But are any of those really targeted at writers? How easy is it to move scenes around? Or to see where the passive sentences are? Or where the adverbs are?

Sure Word allows you to cut and paste and it has a grammar checker which (not too accurately at times) points out the passive sentences. But it really doesn’t go much further beyond that. Some time ago, I started writing a writer’s editor called Amanuensis just for this reason. It had a treeview where you could navigate your individual chapters/scenes easily and even move the chapters around by simply dragging a node on the treeview to the desired location. It had timers to time how much work you’d done in this particular session and a word counter to keep track of the actual number of words you’d written. I actually got started on my first novel using Amanuensis. Then I switched over to using Word and Mind Manager and Amanuensis development came to a grinding halt :p

However, even while using Word, I’ve been really bugged about the actual lack of good writing aids in Word. I have looked around for plugins and add-ons which might help but what there is, seems to be commercial and a bit overpriced. I’ve been thinking about writing a couple of simple tools – an adverb highlighter, a commonly overused word highlighter etc. – for a while now but never got around to it. At least, not till yesterday 🙂 I finally decided to put some time towards getting a macro written and after a whole evening spent debugging the code, I had a working macro for highlighting adverbs. Of course, since the code simply highlights words ending in "ly" (this is how I’ve been doing it in Word till now – use Find/Replace to highlight all words ending in "ly") it ends up with quite a few false positives. So, I added an exclusion list and it all seemed to work fairly well. I have to change the code to include support for footers as well – it currently only works on the document body. And then, I intend to add highlighters for a few other word lists. Once it’s all done, I think I’ll release it so that others can benefit from it too 🙂

Doing it the “right” way …

I’m going through an interesting (perhaps interesting is not the right word :p) debate with somebody on one of the forums I visit. I wouldn’t exactly call it a debate either since I didn’t start out with the intention of debating the point. I had simply posted the first scene from my novel on that forum for comments and critiques and I got one critique (only one mind you :p) from this person who had a few relevant things to say but also in the crit mentioned that I should not use terms such as "credits" or "blaster" in my story because "as any professional would tell me" (he might not have used the exact words, so the quotes are mine :p) that is not the correct way to write science fiction.

I agreed with most of his critiques because they were valid and to the point. However, I found this whole "credits" and "blaster" thing a bit … how shall I put it politely without saying "pig headed"? … irrational? mindless? stupid? I don’t know … one of those or all of those. I just didn’t agree with the way that particular comment was phrased. (There was sense in there – but not the way it was said and not for the reasons expressed by this particular person.)

Now, if you were to look around, you will find a lot of rules to writing and even ones which are specifically aimed at writing science fiction. The Turkey City Lexicon is one really good example of rules and advice on how to (and how not to) write science fiction. Incidentally, if the Lexicon helps you, you might also want to take a gander at the annotated version – it leaves out some of the stuff but it also, I believe, adds a bit to it. So yes, there are a lot of rules on how to write good science fiction. But the trick is not to get bogged down by these rules and not to follow all (or any) of these rules slavishly because "that’s the way it is supposed to be done". You have to take every rule and see if it applies to what you want to do. Sometimes you might even want to break a rule for effect or because it actually makes your story better. But in essence, you should be able to determine what works (and what does not work) for you personally and not be bound by all these rules.

I (or rather Laurie :p) posted the question about "credits" and "blasters" to a different forum – one composed of both writers and science fiction fans. The responses we got were completely different. Not one talked about doing it the "professional" way. They actually came up with arguments both for and against using the terms and in each context, I agreed with what they said. I’ve taken the best of what they’ve said and am incorporating those suggestions into my story because they actually made sense. But do something just because that’s how everybody has been doing it and by golly that’s the way it should continue to be done? Phooie, I say :p

A good reader is hard to find …

Yes, I find myself echoing Feargal Sharky today after actually finding an excellent reader 🙂 At this stage, I realize that I haven’t been giving my first novel to enough people to begin with. Being the lazy kind of git that I am, I gave it to a few people and when I didn’t get any feedback, I forgot all about it and moved on instead of keeping at it till I actually got some feedback. So here I find myself, ready to go the Print on Demand (PoD) route and I still haven’t had my novel read all the way through except by Laurie and one agent.

Now that I’ve received some concrete feedback (not the whole, "I like it and it’s good" variety :p) I am thankful that only one agent has read it instead of a few more – there definitely is a lot more room for improvement. Jasper Fforde once sent me some advice which he sends to all writers who contact him. (It’s a long story, I’ll tell you another day :p). In there, he said that good readers are hard to find and when you find one, you should wine and dine them to make sure that you don’t lose ’em. I now see what he means 🙂

Of course, it’s hard to find good readers. Everybody wants to read your stuff when you ask them. But about 80% of those you give the book to will not read it at all or read the first few pages and then forget about it. Of the rest, perhaps 19% will actually read it but will come back with very vague suggestions or a not quite helpful "I liked it" or "I didn’t really like it". Then there will be that rare 1% who will actually take the time to read your work, make detailed notes as to what worked, what didn’t and even offer suggestions on how to improve things. If you find such a reader, hang on to them – they are rarer than you think 🙂