Frustrated beyond measure. It’s almost a physical feeling, a rage borne of confusion. I’ve at here at my keyboard for forty minutes trying to start a story, and I have produced nothing but three false starts, opening sections that inspire me to continue writing about as much as they would inspire someone else to keep reading.

It’s like being sat at a potter’s wheel, unable to do much more than prod the damp clay with a desultory finger, knowing that the world is full of plates and vases already crafted by craftsmen more original, disciplined and inspired than yourself. Or like joining a degree course in its final week. Or like, or like, or like.

Yeah, I know, “keep writing”, all those clichés. Finish what you start; just type and see what comes out, don’t be critical, just free-associate. That’s what I’m doing here; this is the third day in a row that all I’ve been able to write about is my inability to write; pointless self-castigating screeds, the sound of someone marinading himself in his own inabilities. Finally, I have an hour set aside every day in the quiet of the morning so that I can CREATE, and all I can do with it is the literary equivalent of banging my head against the door of my padded cell.

It’s ludicrous. A whole sixty precious minutes, reserved for my mind to do what it wants to do rather than what it must. And I sit here wanting to get on with my other work, because at least there I know where to go, what to do; there’s a clear route forward. There’s none of this terrifying void of inspiration; none of this horrifying thought that, perhaps, I really am kidding myself about this whole being-a-writer gig, and that I’ve spent a few years talking a good game and bluffing the basics only to fall at the first true hurdle. I really can’t understate the sense of anger coursing through me at the moment, this urge to throw things and shout formless words. Nor can I channel it in any useful way, so it seems. At least not today.

Maybe tomorrow will be different.

[ Regular readers please take note – I've posted this up as a record, a message to a future self who, I sincerely hope, will look back on it in a few months' time and chuckle at how hard it was to start the routine. It's not a bid for sympathy; I just need to have something other than a handful of half-page word processor files and some scribbled-on notebook pages to show for the last few days, so as not to feel it's been an utterly wasted effort. ]

So, the boot took a turn on the other foot. As you may or may not already be aware, ILLUMINATIONS got reviewed over at The Fix Online. And while it’s far from universally lauding the work, the review does us all the highest courtesy possible - it takes us seriously.

My fellow authors all seem to have reached the same conclusion; the level of detail gone into more than mitigates any ego-bruising from the details themselves. It’s like being a martial arts neophyte given a thorough working over by the grand master of the dojo; painful, but extremely educational.

And Alvaro Zinos-Amaro pulled no punches, as is only proper. The reviews of my own stories mostly told me what I already knew, but I’m very happy to see that the ones that got the most respect were the ones I was most confident of. The duration of the FFF experiment thus far coincides with the duration of my career of actually finishing any fiction at all, and to have any of my material pass muster after so little time is more than I might have hoped for.

[ To be honest, I was far more embarrassed to read of the "numerous typographical mistakes afflicting this anthology". ]

So, as it’s fashionable among author types to air their negative reviews at the moment, here are the comments made by Mr Zinos-Amaro on my stories from ILLUMINATIONS, complete with links to the original pieces as published here on VCTB.

In “Alex in Hinterland,” the titular Alex spends time in the Hinterland on a talking, tangible Cloud, against the advice of his peers. What he discovers was not readily apparent to me, though I did get a sense of the story’s implications. The writing seemed somewhat diffuse and the piece as a whole not particularly sharply etched.

A vastly evolved emergent intelligence decides to baptize itself with the name “J” after the square root of negative one. I have no objection to hard SF density, but I’m not sure the profusion of technical terminology in this tale generated a convincing sense of what forces might be at work or helped to maintain the reader’s interest. This tale is weighed down by too much detail and a not particularly inspired ending to achieve what I think it sets out to.

When the Old Lady Evans passes away, the kids are finally able to steal into her house and discover what an “aristos” [sic] keeps for the purpose of entertainment, which may be nothing less than “The Last Bird.” I found the attention to detail and imagery engaging, and though the ending was predictable, the last sentence captured an ironic note that fit snugly within the emotional context of the piece.

In this parable of sorts, talking household appliances worry and fret about “The New Arrival.” This tale, consisting primarily of appliance banter, feels underwhelming, and the ending may be too smart for its own good.

The child narrator of “Daddy in [the] Stone” recounts a weekly Sunday visit to the family’s senescent, mentally frail father. This slice-of-life contains poignant observations and tactfully addresses a delicate but everyday subject. I wasn’t convinced by the narrating voice, which felt like an adult speaking as a child, but there’s enough worthwhile material here for me to recommend it nonetheless.

The young Fentus completes his initiation ceremony and learns some “Secrets of the Faith” shortly thereafter from one of the Order’s priests. The themes, dialogue, characters, and style in this tale offer nothing new, nor do the particulars of their combination. This is all retread material, and the last few sentences augment, rather than diminish, the effect of overall cliché.

The “Alien Abduction” at hand in this tale entails what one might expect. The unfortunate lack of anything new (including the ending) and less-than-stellar writing (for example, the repetitive use of “restrained” and “restraint” in consecutive paragraphs) will likely end up abducting the reader’s time and offer little in exchange.

James and Alex present an optimistic re-evaluation of “Sturgeon’s Law” and consider how it might apply to their “scavving”-based existences. I found the premise entertaining and the characters appropriately depicted for the dramatic purposes in play. As a result, the tale falls in the ten percent margin of Sturgeon’s Law for this reader.

The “physically disadvantaged” narrator of “Oh, For the Life of a Sailor!” joins the Navy, and his decision opens up an unexpected door into his future. Well-realized details help sustain the sense of plausibility in this implausible scenario, and the narrative rhythm helps move things along swiftly.

So there you go. It’s interesting that the subject of “Daddy in the Stone” was misinterpreted; the child’s father is meant to be a holographic recording in a gravestone, rather than a mentally frail shadow of his former self. There’s a lesson in itself; you don’t want to over-do the telling, but nor do you want to under-do it.

Overall, my takeaway points from this review have been twofold.

• Firstly, I need to write far more regularly and less hurriedly (which isn’t exactly news).
• Secondly, I don’t naturally lean toward the sort of story that makes a good flash piece (which isn’t exactly news either).

So, I think I’ll be focusing my efforts on longer pieces for the foreseeable future; I’ve proved to myself that I can finish stories worth reading, so now I think I need to write some that I consider to be worth sending out for publication. As my time is limited, that means I’m going to surrender time that I’d normally devote to meeting the weekly flash deadline in favour of making sure I knock out 500 words a day on something more substantial.

However, I’m hoping that once my authorial muscle is a little more developed through regular exercise, I’ll be better able to produce quality flash pieces on a regular basis as well as the more weighty work. Hell, maybe one day I will - Jay Lake-like - be able to seemingly toss the things off without a thought!*

In other words, I’m stepping back from the front line, but I’ll be back.

---

Oh, I still have some dead-tree copies of ILLUMINATIONS for sale, by the way … so if you’d like to secure a copy of this fine volume of super-short stories and simultaneously support the National Society for Prevention Of Cruelty to Children, please drop me a line!

[ * Note to Jay lake and anyone else - I know damn well he doesn't just toss them off effortlessly. It just looks that way because he's practiced like Sisyphus and nailed the process. The man's an inspiration. ]

OK, you’re going to need roughly an hour, so bookmark this post and come back later if you don’t have the time right now. But I promise that sixty minutes of invested time will be of huge benefit to you, whatever sort of creative work you do. SRSLY.

First of all, you should read this New York Times article about Jan Chipchase (and consider subscribing to his Future Perfect blog while you’re at it). Here in what we used to call the First World we often talk about “revolutionary technologies”, but from our position of privilege we misunderstand the term completely; Chipchase is out there in the dust and monsoons of developing nations discovering how mobile phones really are revolutionising people’s lives in small but tangible ways, and trying to discover how to make them do so more effectively.

“This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.”

It’s a fascinating piece, and I seriously suggest you read it - especially if you’re a fiction writer. It’s about a lot more than just market research, and there are the seeds of a thousand stories in there.

But that’s just your appetiser. The main course is the following video of Bruce Sterling giving the closing talk at an interface design conference in Germany last year. [via BoingBoing]

Even allowing for my fanboy filter amplifying the impact, I think this forty minutes of thinking will blow the top of your head clean off. If you can watch it as a writer of science fiction (or an artist, web developer, or pretty much anything else) and then email me afterwards and tell me honestly that there was nothing there you needed to know, I will give away all my worldly possessions and take up an itinerant lifestyle as your devoted disciple, spending my days sat in the dust by your feet hanging on your every word.

Basically, bad science fiction makes the same mistake made by bad design - it fails to take into account what people actually want. And people want to not have to think.

Watch … and take notes. You’re going to need them.

OK, so I’ve been pretty bloody busy since well before the new year began, and I’ve fallen massively behind with my compiling of writing advice links.

Or rather, I haven’t. I’ve been steadily compiling them in Google Notebook (which is a great tool, especially when used with the Firefox plugin), but the emphasis is on the “piling” … there’s about twenty of the buggers sat in there, taunting me from their position of safety-in-numbers, saying “hah - no time to post us, no time to write, you suck!”

Well, I’m not having that. So let’s offload - call ‘em out by author and/or website, sergeant!

Jim “Justice” Van Pelt

[ Long-time readers will know well my admiration and respect for Uncle Jim; no one tops him for quality friendly writing advice. Most of these are from his LJ feed, but the top one is from the column he does for The Fix.]

• “Sometimes the best bump I can give my writing is to get out of the house. A retreat is great, of course, but packing up my laptop and heading to the bagel shop or library is effective too.”
• “Is there such a thing as a “great” title, or do titles begin to look great because they’re married to “great” stories?  After a while, we can’t imagine the story being titled anything else.  Which comes first?”
• “While we walked, I was reminded again of the challenge and importance of writing with the landscape where a story takes place in mind.”
• “Writing the conclusion to a story can be hard!  First off, the whole story has been leading to this last page, so the sense of responsibility to the story and to the reader is huge.”
• “At any rate, I have a bunch of mini-units to talk about aspects of short story writing.  One that we covered last night was mood or atmosphere.”
• “I become insanely sensitive to repetitiveness in my sentence patterns, and I’m convinced that every reader will see it too.  I sometimes stare at my prose in despair. So, I go to the literature I love best to wash out my ears and to let me hear the rhythms again.”
• “My stance on all writing rules, from the nuts and bolts of grammar to the other much discussed rules of fiction writing (like staying attached to only one point of view, or “show, don’t tell, which I discussed earlier in Every “Rule” Has Exceptions), is that the only rule that matters to the writer is “Does it work?”"
• “Fortunately, your body which needs the oxygen doesn’t know if the breath that produced it was made while not thinking, or if it was the result of conscious effort. Your readers won’t be able to tell the difference. You can write crap consciously or unconsciously, just as you can write effective stuff both ways.”

Luc Reid

• “Don’t Worry: The Characters Don’t Believe It Either”
• “So here’s my advice to you: if you’re serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don’t have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead–just for a month or two–writing every day.”
• “Writer’s Block: Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself”

Jay Lake

• “Having just hammered 30,000 words out of the manuscript, I can say yet again that killing your darlings is hard sport.”
• “Developmental Anatomy of a Book“

Jeff VanderMeer

• Evil Monkey’s Guide to Creative Writing: Tips for Beginners - “(1) An early sense of entitlement is deadly to development. Don’t posture and preen well before you have any right to do so. (In fact, don’t ever.) Them that do rarely develop as writers, although some of them may become widely published over time. They just never recognize they suck.”

Paolo Bacigalupi

• “After today, what I really think is that I’m a dogged writer. If I polish the turd long enough, eventually something shines. It’s really my specialty. Going after a story again and again until finally I figure out how to spin crap into gold.”
• How to write a short story - by throwing away a short story - “I wrote a novelette last week. The interesting thing about it was that I literally had no idea what I was doing.”

Neil Beynon

• “As has been alluded to a few times recently, I have been experiencing more than my fair share of writer’s block, that all pervading paralysing fear that the ideas will dry up and not a single interesting sentence will be transmitted to the page.”

Write To Done blog

[ Some of these are more focused on non-fiction, but still useful. ]

• “How to Disagree“
• “How to Write Conversationally“
• “Research Sources for Writers: A Guide to Backing up Your Words“
• “Clean Up Your Narration: Four Tips For Fiction Writers“
• “31 Ways to Find Inspiration for Your Writing“
• “Short Stories: The Art of the Start” - “While revision is important for the entire short story — you should rip it apart and massage it and mold it until you have it right — I recommend paying special attention to the first paragraph or three.”

io9

[ OMG!!!1-post-not-about-Heroes-or-Torchwood shocker! ]

• Steal This Pitch: 8 Unstoppable Rules For Writing Killer Short Stories - “Short fiction is the “garage band” of science fiction, claims Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, so it’s time to step on that fuzzbox and thrash as hard as you can without knocking over your mom’s weed-trimmer.”

PickTheBrain.com:

• George Orwell’s Five Rules For Effective Writing - “If you want to be understood, if you want your ideas to spread, using effective language must be your top priority. In the modern world of business and politics this is hardly ever the case.”

WordWise:

• Verb Your Enthusiasm - “… a brain-imaging study conducted at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, showed that the brain’s motor cortex responds to merely reading action words like active verbs. Verbs, in other words, stimulate readers, kickstart their imagination, draw them in, compel them to think.”

Yes, some of these are hideously old. Doesn’t mean they’re any less useful, though.

Now, I’m off down the road to talk to an H P Lovecraft-inspired band called The Sword. Enjoy!

Odd Two Out Publishing is extremely proud to present:

ILLUMINATIONS: The Friday Flash Fiction Anthology

ISBN 978-0-9558662-0-3

---

ILLUMINATIONS is a new anthology from small press Odd Two Out Publishing showcasing original, cutting edge short fiction from eight up-and-coming young British writers.

When British author Gareth L Powell started adding short weekly pieces of flash fiction to his website back in July 2007, he didn’t expect anyone else to take much notice.

But soon there were seven other writers doing likewise - Paul Graham Raven, Gareth D Jones, Martin McGrath, Dan Pawley, Justin Pickard, Neil Beynon, and Shaun C Green. Together, they have become known as the Friday Flash Fictioneers.

Flash fiction stories are complete short stories told in fewer than 1,000 words. Quoting from his introduction to the anthology, Gareth L Powell says:

“Adhering to this restricted format can be a valuable exercise for a writer. It’s often a lot trickier than it looks. You have to make every word count. Every thing in the story has to be doing something because there just isn’t room for extraneous waffle.”

The Friday Flash Fictioneers come from diverse walks of life – musicians, office workers, freelance journalists, students, magazine editors – and this new anthology collects together the best of their weekly output.

Edited by Paul Graham Raven, the pieces range from mainstream literature to far-out speculation; from horror to humour; from outright fantasy to straight-faced space opera.

All the stories in ILLUMINATIONS are published under a Creative Commons licence that permits them to be reproduced in the public domain as long as no profit is made in the process.

Copies of ILLUMINATIONS: The Flash Fiction Anthology will be available to order for £6.99 from Odd Two Out Publishing, or from the authors themselves. All profits from the sale of ILLUMINATIONS will be donated to the NSPCC.

Alternatively, The Fictioneers will be running a flash fiction workshop as part of Orbital 2008, the British Science Fiction convention held at the Raddisson Hotel, Heathrow over the Easter weekend. Convention-goers are invited to come along to quiz the team and have a go at writing their own extremely short fiction.

---

[ OK, with the official press release done, I can confess: yes, this is the oft-alluded-to soopa-seekrit project I've been working on recently! LOOKATWHATWEDID!

I'm incredibly chuffed we got it nailed in time for Eastercon, and I'm fit-to-shit that my name's on the cover - not just as author, but as editor too - and in such fine company.

It's been a massive learning experience, not to mention a bizarre mixture of creative fun and hair-tearing frustration, and I shall be talking about some of the things I picked up on the journey in weeks to come.

In fact, let's be honest - it's going to be almost impossible to get me to shut up about it. I hope you'll be understanding ... and I hope you'll buy a copy! It's for charity, y'know! ]

… because, as I’m sure many of my readers know, only one thing procrastinates better than a writer, and that’s an ill writer with twenty mission-critical deadlines breathing down his neck.

Posting this will, believe it or not, be therapeutic - and it will help me toward clearing the RSS backlog, which is surely trying to tell me something:

Enough banter - bring on the freakin’ links, I hear you cry! Well, alright.

---

First of all, if you’re going to write fiction, length is an issue (yes, ladies - even for you). Jay Lake has the low-down on story length, so you can tell your novelette from your novella, and so forth.

***

John “Electric Velocipede” Klima has been involved in some lengthy discussions about the genre short fiction market, and has summarised the initial debate and posted his further thoughts on the matter.

Not so much about the mechanics of writing, but useful for thinking about the markets realistically. The take-away? Don’t get into writing short fiction unless it’s something you love to do, because it’ll never make you a living.

***

If, like me, you find it hard to find the time and focus to write regularly (hah!), perhaps the advice of the Write To Done blog will be of use to you - “write just one thing today, and write it well“.

***

Stuck mid-story in need of a character name? Happens to me all the time - but hopefully this crafty hack from Gareth L Powell will not only cure my fiction of Enid Blyton-style names but give me a reason to love my spam folder.

***

La Gringa supplies a list of attention-getting tricks that will not get an agent to be more sympathetic to your query letter:

• Using the phrase “This is not representative of my best work” in the query letter will probably not help your cause.
• A Xerox of your photo from your high school yearbook will not help sell your book. It will, however, live on in infamy on the intern’s refrigerator door, where a steady collection of lunatic query letters has been growing since December.

Bam!

***

Last but not least, the indispensably avuncular Jim Van Pelt has a round-up of pithy quotes and aphorisms about writing accrued from books, real-life meetings and elsewhere.

Sensible useful advice, delivered straight and friendly. This is the van Pelt way. Nuff reshpeck, innit?

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OK, mania and panic beckons seductively from the to-do list. As the old joke goes, “tea-break’s over, back on your heads!”

Just a quick extension to my ideas about stealth fiction from a little while ago.

Alternate history is form of (genre) fiction that seems to be particularly amenable to stealthing. Take as an example a blog that is publishing the letters of William Henry Bonser (”Harry”) Lamin, a soldier of World War One, exactly ninety years after they were written.

According to Reuters, people are engaging with it in a very real way:

“Many are braced for the dreaded telegram from the army notifying relatives of a soldier’s death.”

Because he’s not a famous historical figure, Lamin’s fate is uncertain, and people engage with him as a real person.

It doesn’t take a great leap to imagine doing something similar, but with a totally fictional character. The course of the war could start subtly shifting away from historical facts after a while, couldn’t it?

Of course, there are nefarious uses this could be put to. But it’s also another way to hide the fiction-ness of fiction and get the buggers hooked, isn’t it?

It’s that time of year when many of us make plans to change our habits and regimens for the better - I have a few resolutions in the offing, mostly to do with health and lifestyle*.

Jim van Pelt is, as always**, thinking about resolutions from the writer’s perspective, and has a list of six (well, technically seven) resolutions for creative writers to consider.

I particularly liked this one:

2.  Write consistently. Don’t do something stupid like let two months go by without actual writing happening.  Those are not only two months that I will never get back, but also writing is about learning and growing.  I’ll be two months behind where I could have been in growth too.  Writing consistently will have the added benefit of making me think about writing consistently.  Someone asked me where my ideas come from, and the real answer is they come because I’m consistently thinking about writerly concerns.  I don’t sit at my computer and then say, “What should I write about?”  I always have the flickering of an idea ready to go.

It chimes well with my personal experiences of recent months. Since joining the Friday Flash Fictioneers, and committing myself to having a piece of flash fiction ready to roll out once every week, I’ve truly found I have story ideas more often than I used to.

It seems I’ve forced myself to be looking for them at a subconscious level … and I’m getting better at making a note of them before I get distracted by something else, as they rarely occur at convenient times.

Any VCTB readers with writing-orientated new year’s resolutions in mind?

---

[* Hey, stop laughing back there!]

[** Since discovering his LJ, I think I've linked to more writing tips from Jim van Pelt than everyone else put together. I heartily recommend anyone who writes to subscribe to his RSS feed - great advice, delivered kindly. Mr van Pelt, I salute you, sir.]

Add more hard flesh to your package;

some bonus inches are never excessive.

Fill her tw*t to the limits -

your girlfriend will thank you for this.

Women acknowledge that

big phalli are more attractive!

Augment your love muscle, forget

about the trouble with your instrument.

Outgrow, outsize, outperform!

Take this pill and make your lassie

feel the difference in your trouser mouse -

small male machine is no longer a problem.

---

[Yes, I know this has been done before, but these were in a consecutive sequence by pure chance, and I couldn't resist capturing it for posterity. Or something like that.]

I expect many of you will have already noticed that the guys at SF Signal were short of more erudite commentators, and hence decided to ask me to contribute to their new “Mind Meld” feature. The question was:

“From your point of view, how has the proliferation of online book reviews affected the publishing world?”

The responses are very interesting, actually - quite harmonious in many respects, though with everyone playing their own little melodic riffs on the theme. Go take a look, leave some comments over there.

***

While we’re on the subject of the effect of the web on genre fiction, here’s an intriguing thinking-out-loud post from Jeremiah Tolbert, who’s wondering where he should be submitting to build up his short fiction career:

“For a while, I decided that I would only submit my work to places that would take electronic submissions. I was making so little off of the sales that I did make that it wasn’t worth the cost of postage and envelopes. I haven’t decided whether I should change that policy yet or not, honestly. So many ‘zines do take electronic submissions now. Which don’t? F&SF, Asimov’s, and Analog. The so-called “Big Three.”

I’m kind of curious to see if I can build a reputation for myself without appearing in those markets. They don’t pay that much better than anyone else, and their circulation isn’t spectacular (although it may be better than just about everyone except Escape Pod). It’s kind of weird, but for the purposes of building an audience, I think making reprint sales to Escape Pod might be the best thing I can do for myself.

That’s a very weird situation, and really represents the state of the industry.”

The man has a point. Your thoughts?