Just a few bits of news

I may have mentioned this before, but my short story "My Name Is Avenger Girl" was accepted for the superhero anthology "The Protectors", edited by Paige. E. Roberts.

Also, my short play "Pleasure to Meet You" is being produced as part of The Vestige Group's "Muses IV: Memories of a House".  This is the third year in a row a piece of mine has been featured in their "Muses" series.

More Perils of Worldbuilding

When it comes to worldbuilding, I like to think that most of us fledgling sf/fantasy writers actually sit down and get the work done.  This probably isn't true at all.  Plenty of wanna-be writers don't do the work at all, much like they don't do the research about querying or how to write a novel.  But a fair amount of us do it, and do it in depth.

The question then becomes putting it on the page.  This is the hard balance.  It's very easy to fall into pure info-dump mode, dropping a ton of history and culture information but not actually telling a story.  Not only is this an easy mistake to make, it's an easy mistake to recognize, no matter how you dress it up.  I was doing this a lot in Crown of Druthal's early drafts, even if I was couching it in a historian giving a lecture and other characters being bored by it.  Lampshade hanging doesn't make it not boring.

The other mistake is almost as easy to do, but harder to realize you're doing, I think.  It's knowing your world SO WELL that you forget that you have to actually explain it.  Just like how, if you were writing contemporary fiction you wouldn't explain New York or London or US History, because you assume the audience knows this.  It becomes very easy to be so immersed you don't realize no one else knows what you know.

I've seen works fall into this trap plenty.  I've fallen into this trap plenty as well.  But it's important to realize that Too Little Information is just as damaging as Too Much.

Yet Another Opinion on the Future of Publishing

My mother pointed me towards a Newsweek article essentially promoting self-publishing as the viable model of the future to circumvent "traditional publishing" and get your work straight to the people.  This article was roughly the same one I've seen several times: taking a single success story and trumping it up as a new paradigm.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, pursuing Traditional Publishing is still the preferred option.  It's what I'm doing, and what I'll continue to do for some time.  But will I reach a point where, failing to break through that way, I will decide I need to put on a publisher's hat?  It's entirely possible.  And the tools to do that, and do it smartly, are indeed out there.  But it's also very easy to do it stupidly.

One key way is doing it before you really are ready to do it.  It's one thing to polish and query and polish and query until you've exhausted your options and you say, "This is really the best I can make it, and no one is picking it up... so why not try this?"  It's another to finish a rough draft, run a quick spell check and upload it to Lulu.

However, here's the thing: regardless of the method one uses to try and get one's work out there, cream will still rise, and lead will still sink.  I think the new paradigm will more go in this direction: self-publishing will not replace traditional... but it will become more accepted as a path to traditional publishing.

Just like youtube has not killed the TV or Movie industry, nor has mp3 sharing killed the music industry, the traditional publishing industry will not be killed by self-publishing in the future.  But, just as these new tools allowed people to find an audience they wouldn't have before, and through that, find a new path to success.

Up until now, the Conventional Wisdom is that by self-publishing, you've screwed yourself out of your chance for traditional publishing.  However, there are enough success stories out there to prove that isn't true: if a publisher thinks there's a profit to be made off your work, they'll go for it.  I think in the coming years we will see more and more success stories like that.

But only if the books are any good to begin with.  Cream rises and lead sinks, after all.

Querying etiquette?

So today I attended a writing seminar, or at least part of it... namely the section on "getting your work out to other people", and naturally a part of that was talking about agents.

A question came up about sending to multiple agents, and the response was in no uncertain terms, NO.  We were told that sending to multiple agents was a huge faux pas, not to be done, a mark of unprofessionalism, etc., etc.

Now, this didn't sound right to me, but I held my tongue.

So I put it out here: unless an agent asks for exclusivity, they don't expect it, right?   A query isn't a commitment, it's... just a query.  You can send them out to five or ten or a hundred agents at once (smartly, of course... no "Dear Insert Agent Name Here"), and it's not a big deal.

Or am I wrong?  I'm perfectly willing to admit I could be.  I'd love some insight here.

Querying in the summertime?

Is July typically a month in which agents take vacation?

I just send out another round of queries last week, and, oddly, I haven't heard any responses yet.  I mean, many agents take several weeks to respond, of course, that's normal.  But typically, in any batch of ten or so, there are a couple who turn it around in 48 hours, though usually with a rejection.

Not that I'm in a big hurry to get rejections, mind you.

Of the queries I have out there, there are three who are currently closed to new queries; a planned, temporary closure from July to September in all three cases.  I find this fascinating.  Is summer the unusually heavy time for querying?  Or is it that three months of closure is necessary to be able to take a mere two weeks of vacation?

Worldbuilding and organic writing

One of my biggest problems is not the worldbuilding, but then taking that worldbuilding and weaving that into a story organically.  The old draft of Crown of Druthal was filled with worldbuild infodumps.  I thought I could get away with some of it by having a main character who is a historian-- it's at least a passable cheat to have him reading about this stuff.  But it still feels like an infodump.

I think this ties into my big problem with prologues in general.  They tend to be (though not always) a rather unartful dump of worldbuild info, sometimes giving away the whole story in the process.  I recently watched the beginning of the pilot of a (failed) genre show that was astoundingly inartful:  several minutes of prologue, mostly done with voiceover narration, rushing through several plot points, and then saying, "Our story begins seven years later".

For Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary, I've been working on having the worldbuilding feel more natural, organic and integrated.  Finding that right balance of showing Maradaine as a living, breathing, working city that is part of a larger culture, a larger nation, while not having that larger world outside intrude too much.

Because there always is that temptation, with all the worldbuilding I've done, to just throw a little more in.

I'm curious, for those who read sci-fi and fantasy, what marks that line between, "That's an interesting bit of knowledge about the world, making it and the characters seem fuller and richer" and "This is a pointless diversion that distracts from my enjoyment of the book"?

 

I honestly think the hardest part of any novel is the part from 20,000 to 40,000 words.

I've often said that novel-writing is like running a marathon.  The latter is something I've never done, of course, but I imagine that running a marathon is a process of pushing through the pain, forcing yourself forward with the knowledge that there IS an end, and while you can't really see it yet, it's real and you can get to it if you just don't stop.

20,000 to 40,000 words is about that.

20,000-30,000 is a swamp, usually.  It's just murk and mess to slog your way through.  And there's stuff in the water that you can't see, and just maybe, maybe, you're a little lost.

For 30,000-40,000, though, it's out of the swamp and it's just a long, hard trek uphill with a steep incline.   Here it's less about confusion or uncertainty-- really once you pass 30K you pretty much are past the point of no return and you will most likely actually finish... and for this it's just work and pushing through the weariness.

Also, I find that once I crack 40K, once I get over that incline, and it's a coast downhill to the conclusion.