Wise words (as ever) from straight-talkin’ Nick Mamatas, this time on the subject of freelancing:

… at the point we are discussing, someone will ask you first. You’ll be solicited to perform some service or produce some product. This is the correct way to respond to a solicitation, if you are at the point of your first (or first dozen or so) solicitations.

• Step one: Say yes.
• Step two: Ask how much the pay is.
• Step three: Ask for specific details on the project.

Simple, sure; but surprisingly daunting to a person with my particular mindset. Which is why this post on squelching modesty in the name of your career is serendipitous, also.

It’s been a hell of a long time since I did one of my writing tip round-ups… but I’ve been collecting links ever since. There are nearly fifty links in the following post, and I culled it down from close to a hundred so we just got the best and most pertinent. So read on – for here be wisdom.

***

We’ll kick off with some tips from rising star and all-round top chap Gareth L Powell. Gareth has some advice on how to start writing a story, and here’s another five useful writing tips

1. Never tell anyone the plot of your story until you’ve finished writing it. Once you’ve told your story, even in outline, some part of you relaxes.

Next, Luc Reid explains the nuts and bolts of plot – if you’ve ever been a little fuzzy on where plot begins and structure or character or worldbuilding ends (yeah, me too), this is an essential read.

“… I’ll suggest a definition of what a plot actually is, and lay out what I’ve learned so far about putting one together. Many thanks to friends who recently posed this question in a clear enough way that I realized I needed to think it out.”

io9 took a brief break from blithering on about Battlestar bloody Galactica and provided a rather useful post titled “How To Bring The Weird In Your Near-Future Stories”:

So how can we, as writers and storytellers, create a believable medium-near-future world?

How, indeed. Go find out.

***

No writing tips round-up would be complete without a healthy dose of Jim Van Pelt, so here’s some highlights:

• Listen to Your Language: “The poet Lew Welch, whose thoughts about writing have influenced me, said, “The basic tool is speech.” What he meant is that what we write down on the page is a representation of ourselves speaking. But, as he also said, “If you want to write you have to want to build things out of language and in order to do that you have to know, really know in your ear and in your tongue and, later, on the page, that language is speech. But the hard thing is that writing is not talking, so what you have to learn to do is to write as if you were talking, and to do it knowing perfectly well you are not talking, you are writing.”"
• Who Critiques Your Stuff?: “Imagine this situation: your teacher asked you to bring rough drafts to class for peer editing. You break up into small groups to share your manuscripts. The teacher may have given you pretty specific instructions for what to look for, or you may have been told, “Read your peer’s paper and tell them what you think.”"
• Writing Rules: “Part I, and I think this is the hardest part, is figuring out what is in your head. What do you want to say? Fortunately, I think writing helps you to figure out what is in your head. Somebody said once, “How do I know what I think until I read what I’ve written.” There’s some truth in that.”
• Procrastination: “Yesterday I put up a shelf in my eleven-year old’s room, which would be a pretty good thing to have done if I hadn’t have bought the shelf and hardware to do it six months ago. I’m a horrible procrastinator. There’s almost no job that has to be done right now that I can’t figure a reason to put it off until later, and that includes writing.”
• How to Finish a Novel in Nine Months: the Teacher Edition
• Why Writing is Good for Us: “Tonight was my last night for the college creative writing class. I end by giving them the “everything I wish other writing teachers had told me but didn’t” lecture.”

And here are some of his “The Day Job” columns for The Fix Online:

• Making a Writing Group Work: “For most writers, part of their writing process involves seeking feedback. At first that might mean giving the manuscript to a friend or spouse, and sometimes that works out, but you’re darned lucky if someone that close to you can also give you an informed and honest opinion about your work.”
• The Day Job: Quitting It: “Just like short stories, though, a novelist has to continue to produce novels to continue to produce income. An out of print book generates no income. I know at least three novelists who are doing kick-butt successes in the novel world right now, but none of them feel they have the income to depend on the books for their living.“
• Carpe Penicullus: “Time’s winged chariot pauses for no one, and for writers whose passion almost always takes multiple hours, days, months, or years for the completion of a single project, the clattering of those distant hooves must sound distinctly loud, if we remember to listen to them.”

Uncle Jim is the bomb, kids. Pay attention.

***

SFX (perhaps inspired by io9’s example) also took a break from wanking on about BSG and Doctor Who to do some interviews with some of the Gollancz UK publishing team, which means you can get advice on writing (and submitting) from Gillian Redfearn and Simon Spanton acting in concert, and from the formidable Jo Fletcher, who – ninja-like, perhaps – operates alone.

The SFX peeps also had a chat with genial rogue Paul Cornell to get the perspective from the other side of the editorial desk:

“Don’t tell them everything the character knows. Why is this odd scene happening? You can hold motivations back for as long as you like. Presenting something that’s anti-intuitive and then explaining it through the substance of the story always works. Like with Orwell’s ‘clock that was striking thirteen’ in 1984: it says wrongness.”

***

Another font of writing about writing is the redoubtable Jeff VanderMeer. Sometimes controversial, sometimes (to me at least) impenetrable, he’s quite the philosopher of writing-as-process and writing-as-life:

So mastery actually equals uncertainty. The more mastery you achieve, the less confident you become, although I don’t really mean “confidence” and “uncertainty” in the strict dictionary definitions of the words. This is a good kind of uncertainty, and a bad kind of confidence. Because you are uncertain, despite having mastery, you know that your writing is still alive, that you are not simply doomed to repeat the same path you chose so many times before. Because you feel once again as if you are writing your first book, you know that writing is still meaningful to you.

Whatever you do from now on, don’t feel that it has to always be successful. To be successful, to be as good as you can possibly be in whatever field you choose, you need to have permission to fail. You have to feel like you can bungee jump out to the edge of success and into that space where the ropes might break. If you don’t, you won’t take risks, you won’t get out there, to that area with a night sky full of unfamiliar stars where “success” might become either something extraordinary or utter failure. Because utter failure and extraordinary accomplishment are conjoined twins much of the time.

Or, put another way, the space between a “publishable” story or novel and a “good” story or novel can be a chasm.

I should give myself permission to fail, I think. It would make the, er, failing a little easier.

***

Nick Mamatas is the one person you don’t ask for advice on writing unless you’re prepared for the shocking warts-and-all underbelly of the writer’s lifestyle and mindset, stripped of glamour and cool before being laid out bloody like the flayed flesh of your naive dreams:

You have to stop caring whether you live or die.

This is not just apathy about life, but a more active denial of the social world. You have to get comfortable with the idea of walking around without skin, with not caring at all whether or not your parents ever speak to you again, with not stopping after your lovers all leave in teary huff after teary huff, whether your book sells two thousand copies or two million, whether or not everyone knows exactly what imagery you masturbate to. This doesn’t mean merely being confessional, but simply ready. If your imagination — your imagination — suggests that the best solution to some problem you have is the insertion of your right arm into a wood chipper, you must eliminate the social, personal, and autonomic buffers that would keep you from doing just that.

Eeep.

***

I’m always relieved to find that my dread and hatred of the mechanics of writing – the “actually sitting down and hitting the keys” part – is not something exclusive to me. S C Butler, for example, knows the pain:

You might ask, why do I write at all? The answer? Because the only thing I hate more than writing is not writing.

Nor am I the only person who beats himself up over getting nothing done (because I’ve been, I dunno, procrastinating and doing a gargantuan links post or somesuch). Howard Andrew Jones of Black Gate Books:

It is much easier for me to do this thing called NOT writing than it is to actually write. I imagine it’s easier for all writers to NOT write, except that when we’re NOT writing the NOT part eats away at us. Me, when I’m NOT, I feel more and more like a failure, or simply a wuss. Yet if I sit down and write 500 words I’m not satisfied. I say to myself, well, if I’d actually had two or three hours to write, I could have written a few thousand words, why didn’t I get it together? Wuss.

Hell, even seasoned pros like Elizabeth Moon find themselves saying “It’s not supposed to be this hard, is it?”

Sometimes the story comes roaring out like a flash flood down the creek. Unstoppable, full of energy, exhilarating (even a bit scary, and definitely LOUD.) When a story does this, it’s great fun to write, shooting the rapids and yelling in triumph at the end.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

And that’s the thing you have to fight against, says Justine Larbalestier:

Writing through a crap day is the very hardest part of being a writer. Then getting up the next morning and doing it again. And the next. And repeat until the bloody book is finally finished.

Then again, she points out that not everyone sees writing the same way:

A year earlier I was bitching to this same writer that I had no idea how my book ended. I had nine tenths of the book, but no ending, and I had no idea what to do.

They thought I was insane: “How could you get that far into a book and NOT KNOW THE ENDING?!”

Um. Cause that’s how I write books.

While you’re there, you might want to ask Justine how she finished her first novel.

***

M John Harrison’s writing advice is multilayered, much like his stories: the advice itself is telling you something, but the way it is written is telling you something yet more. If you can decode it, of course.

Some kind of directness of image which would obviate all that narrative guff. You can find it in Surrealism, traditional ghost stories, 15th Century engravings of witches’ cats, in unwriterly reports of hallucinations, madness, alien abductions.

I feel exactly like Mrs Keilar, one of my alter egos in Nova Swing: “This morning,” she said quietly, “I sat here for an hour without moving. I ache. I’m waiting for something to happen, and I don’t even know what part of my life it will approach from.” Always write what you know. The book will tell you what that is. Eventually.

You have to look at the major transitions of your life with a metaphor that makes aesthetic and emotional sense.

***

Here’s a few thoughts from Paul McAuley:

Ian Fleming claimed to write the James Bond novels at the rate of 2000 words per day. 1000 in the morning, followed by lunch and a swim; 1000 in the afternoon, and then cocktails and the company of beautiful women. It took him six weeks of this regime to finish a novel. Nice work if you can get it.

SF and fantasy novels not only have to provide an ending for their characters; they also have to give an idea of how the world in which they are set has been changed, and whether it will carry on changing, and in which direction.

***

Here’s a mass of wisdom from Elizabeth Moon:

• Word games… the constraints that your chosen form puts on word choice.
• Characters I & Characters II: “It’s a principle of logic that statements in the indicative cannot (logically) lead to conclusions in the subjunctive or imperative. That is, factual statements do not lead *logically* to “should” statements….something we observe when we look at current events. Without the intervention of a value system, the existence of a problem does not induce action to correct it. For the fiction writer, this means that dumping a problem on your character’s foot will not ensure any particular action. Your character won’t act unless he or she is motivated to act, and motivation requires more than “just the facts, ma’am.”"
• Story

***

The rate at which Jay Lake sells stories, you figure the guy’s gotta know what he’s doing. I expect he’d claim otherwise if pressed, but that’s modesty in action, methinks. Observe:

• On “the plot diamond“: “The second act is where you (mostly) stop throwing open new doors and begin to concentrate on what all those choices mean to the characters and their story. This is the waist of the diamond. The famous “muddle in the middle” comes from this shift in both momentum and direction, when the author has to figure out what the heck it all means and drive the story in some direction or another.“
• On reading as a writer: “… it’s dangerous not to read. And unpublished work just isn’t the same. The qualitative experience is different, first off – I’m almost always reading with a pencil in my hand (or the Word comments feature turned on). Which is to say, I’m reading critically, and not staying inside the flow of the story much, if at all. The expectations are different, too. A sheaf of printouts, or .doc file, are simply not the same physical or mental experience as a book.”
• On description and setting: “I go back and forth on description in my own work. Generally, if I want to I can spray on the adjectives like an air compressor with a busted shut-off valve. Sometimes that works.”

***

Here’s some advice on character-building from David Louis Edelman:

… think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up. (Additive sculpture, my Art History major wife informs me, is the type where you pile up stuff to build your object, whereas subtractive sculpture is where you start with an existing hunk of something and chisel away the stuff you don’t need.) Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself.

And more elsewhere:

Almost all good stories need conflict – and not the epic battle-style of conflict. The conflicts that bring characters alive are the smaller conflicts that occur between two people, a small group and the internal conflicts we deal with on a daily basis.

***

Via Making Light, some advice from playwright and screenwriter Todd Alcott on writing dialog:

To every extent possible, characters should not tell each other how they feel. Any time a character tells another character how he or she feels, the audience is going to wonder “what the heck is he or she getting at?” Any time a character says “Here’s the truth of a matter:” what should follow the colon is anything other than the truth of the matter. Think of it: any time someone comes to you in your daily goings-about and says “Let me tell you something about myself” or “I have some feelings I want to share with you” or “The fact of the matter is…” you want to turn around and run in the opposite direction. Because the only reason someone would come up to you and offer you some kind of truth is because they want something from you.

***

Let’s not neglect the non-fiction fields, either: here’s 15 Tips on How to Generate Ideas and Write with Ease:

I find that some Zen meditation techniques enhance my writing. Most of the problems that arise in the writing process happen when our mind is at war with itself. At those times our creative energy is scattered, instead of being focused in one steady beam.

Plus 3 Things You Need to Know about Using Dialogue in Non-fiction:

Dialogue works as a hook because it makes a story out of mere information. Open a daily paper at random and observe how journalists use this technique.

And advice that applies equally to both sides of the fence, coming in this instance from a copywriter: How to Lose 30 Pounds of Word Flab Overnight

I always recommend lean copy. And it’s twice as important online. Whipping copy into shape is an important skill for any writer, because all of us start with flabby first drafts.

***

But what to do with that story when it’s finished, hmm? Well, first you check it thoroughly:

One of the best one-sentence pieces of advice about writing professionalism I got from Octavia Butler. She said that you shouldn’t ever send something out that had mistakes in it that you knew of. You were ultimately responsible and a professional didn’t send out something with errors.

Then you can send it out to adorn a slush-pile – but take a tip from Gareth D Jones and try some out-of-the-ordinary targets:

The moral to this tale is: don’t limit your markets.

Indeed – and don’t be so proud as to refuse to edit your piece if the changes mean the editor will take it.

It was funny though, that the publisher actually called me with the acceptance, because she had important news. It went a little like this…

Eventually, though, you may have to accept that no one wants to give your tale a home. Tobias Buckell talks about trunking stories:

I’ve written over 130 short stories and published just over 30 of them, and about 95 of those are now trunked (and for those following along ‘trunked’ means ‘no longer submitting the short story you’ve written to any markets.’)

And we’ll give fellow fictioneer Neil Beynon the last word as regards how you should react to those rejection slips:

… I could wax lyrical about how it’s unprofessional, how it shows a lack of realism around the way both small press and main stream publishing works – I could even tout that really irritating argument that every successful author has been rejected at least once. All this is true. But I fear it misses the heart of the matter.

That being it’s just plain rude to gob off about being rejected.

Amen.

***

Now, I should be writing something that isn’t a big links-list…

Just thought I’d share these with you good people – a couple of opportunities to make a splash with some flash, so to speak.

***

First off, PlotMedic Sarah Ellender clued me in to the Waterstones “What’s Your Story” competition, wherein you have to write a story of any kind that “fits on a postcard” – which, if you enter online, is conveniently defined as 600 words maximum.

The national winners get a free Arvon writing course, and the stories will be featured alongside the big-name writers in an anthology of similar works – which is a prize money can’t buy, AMIRITE? So, go flex your flash muscles. I can’t find a closing date, but best to assume it’s sooner rather than later.

***

So, 600 words is too long for you, eh? How about … 140 characters, no more, no less? That’s the challenge over at Copyblogger in their Twitter Writing Contest, in which you can win an iPod Nano. Not quite so prestigious a prize as the Waterstones gig, perhaps, and the deadline is this Friday … oh, and you need to have a Twitter account to post it, natch.

But y’know, exposure is exposure … and I’m betting they don’t get many sf entries. So go show the copywriters how the speculative crew mix it downtown, y’hear?

Have fun!

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

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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.

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[ 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.

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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.

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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.

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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“.

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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.

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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!

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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?