Today, my fantasy story “Defy the Grey Kings” went live over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is a new short story in the same setting as my infamous serialised novel Tusk, the world where iron-age elephants have enslaved humanity…
(Picture courtesy of Rhys James, from the late lamented Terra magazine)
“There are many ways to kill an elephant. When that mountain bears down on you, shaking the earth and screaming for your blood, show no fear.
Only without fear will you see the truth. They are quick, even draped in chain and iron, but you are quicker by a whisker. They fight like devils, but it only takes three people who know what they are doing to bring an elephant down.
They are afraid of you.
All elephants can die.”
To read the full story, visit the most excellent Beneath Ceaseless Skies via this link:
Well, I just put the finishing touches to THIS EMPTY EARTH, a science fiction thriller.
So I started this in November 2013, while being distracted by life, earning the very tricksy certification to do clinical coding, and every now and then sneaking off to work on a short story or novella. I suppose 18 months isn’t too bad a stretch for cranking out a novel, fitting a writing career around every other damn thing 🙂
With the caveat that this is of course the first draft (draft 1.5 I suppose, as I edit while I go) I am now in the market for some wonderful beta readers who will pull no punches. I shall thank any volunteers with an acknowledgement should the book find a home, my eternal thanks, and the offer of a quid pro quo beta read should you also be a writer.
Peter Ball, please inform your parents that I have finished my damn novel 🙂
Some of you might remember last year when I introduced you to Drusilla, the Ditmar Diprotodon. This time-travelling spokesmammal of Australian SF has apparently remained in our time-stream, mostly for the fiction. Rumours of the secret megafauna invasion are still largely exaggerated and (for now) she is an ambassador of literature and peace. Today, she joins me on the Fisch-blog to talk about all things Ditmar.
JF: Hi Drusilla the Ditmar Diprotodon, thanks for stopping by.
DDD: My pleasure, Jason. Thanks for the huge bushel of vegetation.
JF: I’d do the same for any of my guests. Now, my sources tell me that you’re a passionate advocate of the Ditmar Awards.
DDD: Indeed. I think it’s wonderful to reward creative minds. We had a similar popular-vote award back in the Pleistocene Epoch, “The Mammal’s Choice Award”. Though our categories were more along the lines of Best Survivor, Species Viability, Most Effective Predator and the like. We still had a Fan Art category though.
JF: Megafauna are nothing if not organised. So, Drusilla, do you know who you are nominating in this year’s Ditmar Awards?
DDD: Oh yes! I’ve perused the 2013 Ditmar Eligibility List and cobbled together a list of my favourite books, novellas, short stories and even some reviews and podcasts that I got into last year. The beauty of the Ditmar is that I can nominate as many things in as many categories as I like. You don’t dilute or divide your nomination by doing so.
JF: So, if you were a creative type nominating your own work (which is okay to do) it doesn’t hurt you at all to list other works in the same category?
DDD: Indeed. You’re a mug if you don’t. I think that this mechanism effectively neutralises any self-touting – by the time the self-nominations are tallied up, the real results would come from the additional “I also liked this stuff” nominations.
JF: So, you’re saying the system works?
DDD: I know the Ditmars are not without their own controversies. Nary a year goes by without some sort of battle royale about the results, accusations of bloc voting, all of that drama. It reminds me in many ways of the “Mammal’s Choice Award” of 50,000 BCE. Brutor the Marsupial Lion was accused by many of rigging the vote for Most Effective Predator, but it turned out he really was the Most Effective Predator, as numerous corpses attested to.
JF: So do you think there was bloc voting, both now and then?
DDD: Probably. But that’s the law of the savana. No doubt many of Brutor’s relatives put their paws to the ballot, but it was probably a statistical blip when compared to the other terrified votes. At least the result was accurate! The Ditmar nomination process resembles a circus of touting and enormous lists of eligible works, but I think it’s a necessary process. After the initial flurry of activity, the overall numbers would float to the surface, and then the most representative value appears on that final ballot paper.
JF: I heard mention that you were frustrated by one of the rules?
DDD: Yes. As a fan, I was stymied by rule 4.1 “Nominations will be accepted only from natural persons active in fandom”. Stupid homo sapiens, of course you try to keep the fun all to yourselves. But ultimately I got around it by signing up to each Natcon, and I quote “or from full or supporting members of the national convention of the year of the award.”
JF: That’s clever.
DDD: [munching sounds]
JF: We need another wheelbarrow of lettuce in here.
Ah, the synopsis. That most painful of things, where an author has to compress a novel’s worth of organic sproutings into one or two concise pages. And oh, how we wail and gnash our teeth when called upon to do so.
“It’s just so HARD,” we say. “I don’t WANT TO.”
But here’s the truth; you have to. This is the way a publisher can a) determine your ability to get to the point b) determine that you actually have written a book with a defined beginning/middle/end c) be sold on the sizzle of your steak.
It’s a marketing document, and I don’t think they’re actually that difficult to do. Some folks I know and respect spend inordinate amounts of time on these –Â with all due respect, I think they’re all crazy. We’re talking weeks, even months of time. On a 1-2 page marketing document.
Here’s what I believe: if you can’t get a synopsis right in an afternoon, you need to hand in your writer card. Here’s the Fisch One-Page/One-Afternoon Synopsis Method.
1) Present tense throughout. Limited or no adjectives.
2) Three or four biggish paragraphs. The first one briefly introduces your protagonist, one or two tag-line style descriptors of your setting, and brushes over the opening act of your novel.
3) Second paragraph introduces the antagonist/conflict, and brushes over the second act of your book. Again, broad strokes, and don’t worry too much about your subplots and the nitty gritty. We’re talking how you would convince someone at a bar to sleep with your book (if that makes sense). If you bore the poor person with a detailed description of your stamp collection, you’re going home alone.
4) Third paragraph goes over your final act, and resolves everything. Don’t do rhetorical questions here: “does she survive the assassination attempt? BUY MY BOOK AND FIND OUT.” the point of the thing is, you have to tell the reader, in present tense, exactly how the conflict is addressed, and how the story resolves.
5) Connect these three biggish paragraphs with one sentence movie-style taglines, just to keep it interesting. This also proves your ability to write succinctly, and provides a bit of life to what might otherwise be a boring marketting document.
6) Close off with a pitching paragraph, something along the lines of this: ‘”Papa Lucy and the Boneman” is a complex fantasy, designed to appeal to readers of Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. If Gilgamesh found himself on the set of Mad Max, this is the story that might result.’
And that’s IT. That’s all you have to do. Go back over it of course, tighten everything up, take out every unnecessary word, and make it as interesting as you can. If an adjective pops up, kill it dead. I maintain that you can knock one of these out in an afternoon, anything else is just an exercise in masochism.
And that’s okay 🙂 when it comes to the bad habits in one’s writing, you are in the unique position where you get endless do-overs. Before you release your brain-babies into the wild, you get to carve, polish and refine them to your heart’s content. The flip side of this is, you are almost always too close to your work. “A face that only a mother could love” most definitely applies to artists and their creations, perhaps moreso.
With that in mind, when it comes time to tweak your writing, my advice is this: identify your weaknesses. Find the ways that you frequently break the rules, look at lazy habits that you might have gathered along the way. Case in point, I know that I’m shocking with passive voice, throw cliches around like confetti, and my endings almost always have to be thrown out and rewritten. But right after typing “THE END”, that creative post-coital glow sets in, and like everyone else I can see no wrong in my child. I’m a genius, it’s perfect, and naught need be changed.
BOLLOCKS. I’m as awful as I’ve always been, and committed almost all of the writing sins I swore off last time. My recommended process is to go off, have a cuppa, hell, take a week or two off if I can. Stuff the hubris and ego back under the stairs. Then I look at my slab of word-vomit with fresh eyes, and unleash the editing chainsaw. Next step is to find that Achilles Heel, and carve it up like Leatherface.
So, we’ve reached the end of the financial year. I’ll be honest with y’all, 2011/2012 was extremely busy, and I came within a whisker of burning out. I wrote over 200,000 words of new fiction, including the current draft of my novel “Papa Lucy and the Boneman”. I also wrote three complete novellas, three or four short stories, a swag of pitches and proposals, as well as all the online buggerising around, social networking and such.
In truth, I did all this in about 10 months – for the last 2 I’ve been taking things very easy. Like anyone bitten too often by the writing bug, I’ve toyed with the idea of just chucking in the towel. And like anyone bitten too often by the writing bug, I laugh at people who say this (including myself). Last couple of weeks I’ve been back on board in force, trying to meet the last swag of deadlines, and planning my time over the next 6 months or so.
Refreshed. Ready. I intend a frontal assault on the Word-Castle, where I will storm the walls. In coming months, I intend to roundhouse several nouns and adverbs in the face, and flush thousands of paragraphs out of hiding.Â
Finally, some AWESOME and EXCITING news coming soon. The moment it’s all official-like, you can be sure to find out about it here 🙂 I will say one word only: Tamsyn.
PS: here, have a link to an online Elements of Style. Highly recommended for writer-types.
