Yeah, about ficly.

Giving it another shot. I still can't bring myself to criticize some of the stories, but I figure that's a personal flaw. I have posted a couple of new stories of my own recently, trying to work myself into a frame of mind for other writing. I thought this one was fairly clever. Unfortunately I had to end it early to fit in the 1024 character limit.

Son of Bonnacio

“…”

“Aldo!”

“What?”

“Come here!”

“Right now? Why?”

“You need to meet someone.”

“I am rather busy right now. Maybe later.”

“I really think you should make the effort to meet this fine individual.”

“Maybe you don’t think that my time is of any great importance, but I am working at the moment. Perhaps later.”

“While we all have the utmost respect for your time and work, your contributions to the field of mathematics are legendary, I think you may wish to make an exception in this particular case.”

“If you believe flattery sufficient to divert my attention from my current investigations, you are mistaken. I require more information concerning the identity of this famous personage, upon which you waste much breath, before I will pause my exertions. There are rules for this sort of introduction, this social encounter, as you are well aware.”

“In that case I beg your pardon, and also that of my esteemed friend, whose rules I must break in this instance. Aldo, I would like to introduce Leonardo of Pisa.”

A heroic return

I just returned from a vacation back home to see my parents and extended family. Along the way we introduced my children to camping, riding ATVs, fishing, and riding in powerboats. I managed to nearly double the number of bass caught in my lifetime, learned that I can still water ski, found out that jet skis are a lot of fun, and nearly game my mother a heart attack when we showed up unannounced on her birthday.

Unfortunately, I was sick when we left, and I'm still sick now. I'm taking an additional day off of work to see if I can kick it entirely.

Just before we left last week I received the form letter rejection from F&SF for my story The Cowboy Dance. I didn't expect to be published there, but now after reading some of the kerfluffle over the F&SF writing workshop that has popped up recently, I had no idea that my chances (as a new writer) were actually so low.

So low that I wonder if winning the lottery is a better gamble that trying to break into the "big three" science fiction magazines...

Why am I trying to be published? It's a good question, and one that I need to answer to find out if I really want to be a successful writer. What it really boils down to is whether or not I am willing to put forth the time and effort required to break into the business...

I work a full-time job. I have two small children and a wife. I have a house to maintain and other interests. When I am working on a story or a novel, that is time that I am not doing other things. Is it worth it to me to spend weeks, months, or years of free-time on a project that will ultimately not result in any tangible rewards? The real writers, the ones that make a living at it, would probably say something along the lines of "yes, if you love writing."

I like writing. There are times when I really enjoy it. But do I love writing?

I don't know.

Ficly

I am growing increasingly disillusioned with ficly.

For those of you who stumble across this posting and know not of what I speak, the gist of the site is thus:

Write a story containing no more than 1024 characters. Not words. Characters. And yes, spaces and punctuation count. There's a bit more, such as the ability to write prequels and sequels to a story (also limited to 1024 characters), challenges that one can post and enter, and inspiration derived from flickr images (currently not working). But that's the basics. Write an extremely short story.

You can imagine that one might be hard pressed to fit a complete story into such limited space, and in one respect you would be right. But that's the challenge, paring down your work to fit into the allotted space without losing the meaning. In many respects, it's actually a very good tool. It teaches one to write succinctly, something that I (as a scientist, used to technical writing) can appreciate. It also forces you to examine your vocabulary - is there a single word that takes the place of three - for instance.

When I first began writing on the site (known as ficlets.com in its previous incarnation), I really enjoyed writing the short stories, or ficlets as they were called. It helped me to stretch my creative writing muscles, which had atrophied during my long tenure in graduate school and in my post-doc position. Even I could see improvement from my first, uninteresting stories to my latter works.

Then ficlets went away, an unfortunate casualty of AOL's cost-cutting measures. Fortunately Kevin Lawyer, one of the prime architects under AOL, decided that he didn't want to see it die, and thus he spent valuable personal time recreating the site as ficly.

During the dark time when ficlets was no more and ficly was under development, I decided to really stretch my writing muscles. As mentioned in a previous post, I wrote a full-length, badly written, science fiction novel. I wrote a short story and tried to have it published, to no avail. I wrote another short story and decided to try to turn it into a novel. I abandoned that project, wrote another short story which is currently sitting in a pile somewhere in Hoboken, NJ awaiting the attention of a reader. This doesn't even mention the untold number of half-started stories sitting in a folder on my hard drive.

Then ficly returned. I immediately opened my old account and posted a couple of stories. I resolved to be more active, to comment more, to post more.

I failed in this regard.

I don't want this to sound arrogant or condescending, but returning to ficly now (for me) is like riding the kiddie roller coaster after the steel, twisting, inverted, floorless behemoth. The space seems too restrictive. Not because I can't write a scene or story under the character limit, you'll see that I can, but I just don't want to.

There is another reason, one brought to the forefront recently at the ficly blog and in other places, such as the Social Entropy++ forum at Penny Arcade (many of whom have recently begun posting at ficly en masse). As an aside, I have no problem with the PA forum posters joining the site, as an old fuddy-duddy and one of the earliest adopters of ficlets, I welcome them.

But some of them have a point: ficly is not harsh enough.

How many times have I stumbled across a story on ficly rife with spelling and punctuation errors, clumsily executed or juvenile in its theme, and yet it is followed by "five out of five" reviews, cries of "truly excellent!"? Too many to count. I can only shake my head and move on.

I sent my latest short story to an old friend of mine from high school, who is much more immersed in science fiction writing than I, for critique. His comments were not scathing, but they were blunt and honest. Not quite "this part sucks", but "this part really needs work - it's not good." I appreciated his honesty.

In fact, the comments I received from him were nowhere near the harshness of comments I receive regularly on my scientific publications. Try the scientific peer review process sometime. There's a reason it's anonymous. The comments are brutal, and I've been reading strangers' opinions of my professional work going on fifteen years now. Someone telling me my scifi story needs work is nothing.

I've never gotten that kind of feedback on ficly. But more to the point, I don't feel comfortable providing that kind of feedback on ficly, either. Which might seem strange. I've torn up graduate students' proposals and manuscripts with so many marks that they felt as if they were physically beaten, but if I tried that on ficly...well...

...for one thing, there's a lot of young writers on the site. And as John Scalzi said about teenage writing (and this includes my own experience) - "Right now, your writing sucks." That's part of it. I'm not quite prepared to rip apart the works of young people (should it be that bad). So I do something worse, I read it and move along without saying anything.

Another part of it is I don't really know people who post on the site. When I hand a paper back to a grad student in my lab, I have a good idea on how they will react. I know which ones will grimace, but nod and take it in stride. I also know which ones need a little hand-holding and reassurance. I have no idea how writer34732 on ficly will respond to a truly honest criticism.

So I don't comment much on ficly. And I don't post new stories there much. Which means I am not really involved in the site any longer.

Ficly, have I outgrown you? I don't know. Maybe. I've opened the site many times recently and poked around disinterestedly, but I have not interacted much at all.

I can see myself visiting there irregularly, perhaps dropping a short story now and again to get creative juices flowing, but I don't think it will ever be consuming for me like ficlets once was.

This isn't a rant. This isn't a complaint about the fine site that Kevin has created or the people there who contribute regularly, or those that just really, really enjoy the short format.

In this particular case, it's really not you, it's me.

A mini rant

Inspired by a random story I just read on ficly...

There is a phenomenon that occasionally arises, in science fiction and fantasy writing in particular, in which an author attempting to describe the indescribable uses direct opposites as adjectives detailing the same event. Here is an example which I have just created (not, to the best of my knowledge, from any particular work):

"He stared into the void and his mind reeled. The opening seemed as big as the world, yet was no larger than the tip of a needle. Colors swirled in shades of black and white. The sound was deafening, yet all he heard was silence."

There were a lot of words there that said absolutely nothing. Can you picture the scene? Do you see the enormous void that's tiny? Do you hear the deafening sounds of silence? Not really? Yeah, I have a hard time myself. I imagine that it is difficult if not impossible for my brain to comprehend or imagine such phenomena. I might convince myself that I can see it, but deep down I know I don't - know I can't.

One might argue that this is the point, that the character is experiencing something so far beyond the norm of typical human experience that words do not exist to describe it. That the medium of writing itself is too limited.

Sure. Okay. I get that can happen and might even be appropriate and fit nicely into the scene or story.

But it's a cliche, like the group of fantasy adventurers meeting in a tavern, a crutch for the author to lean on instead of imagining more creative descriptions that might actually allow readers to form a mental image and share in the experience of the characters.

It's like he reads my blog! (He doesn't)

And as if I needed any validation, John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War, writes a blog post today validating the choices I made which were described in my previous post.

The New Project

I have an idea in mind for a new novel. And yes, that means that I've abandoned the novel at the center of my 1K/Day Challenge (Stranded).

Actually, that wasn't even the first novel that I've made significant progress on and abandoned. While Stranded petered out around 60,000 words, I actually finished a novel called Persephone a while back whose first draft was 109,000 words.

(I'm evidently big on the one-word title thing.)

I will be the first to admit that Persephone kinda sucked. It told the story of a ship launching on a twenty-year mission to the closest habitable planet, fleeing an Earth ravaged by a plague that killed or will eventually kill, well, basically everything. Of course, things went wrong and the twenty-year trip turned into two-hundred. Along the way, the descendents of the original crew had to deal with the plague that they had supposedly left behind, and genetic modifications made against their will. The book ended as they approached their new planet, drastically reduced in population. I actually had the rough outlines of a second (and third!) book in the series.

But hey, it was my first novel. If nothing else it proved to me that I could finish one! And many sites that I've read on the internet suggest writing your first novel and throwing it away. Check...and check.

Stranded was a different story. It started as a short story but I felt that the concept was too big for the limited space. I tried to expand it out into a larger narrative, but basically I ran out of steam and enthusiasm for the work. If I wasn't excited to write it, I'm pretty sure few people would be excited to read it.

So, emboldened by actually sending out my short story The Cowboy Dance (and I'm proud of that story regardless of whether it is successfully published or not), we come to my next big idea. Here's the back cover blurb I hastily jotted down. Based on this, would you read this book, tentatively titled Emanations?

“Emanations, or ghost ships as they are called by the inhabitants of the planet Brighid, are images of approaching craft travelling faster than the speed of light. A byproduct of the technology and appearing at the destination at the exact moment that a ship enters hyperspace, the insubstantial craft are perfect recreations of how the vessel will appear when it eventually arrives. Which is exactly what troubles young shuttle pilot Cryus Palmer, who is convinced that he saw himself aboard a mysterious ghost ship due to arrive in less than a week. If that is truly him, how did he get on board the ship? The answer will lead him into the deep tunnel city of Archein and against the gangster lords who control the planet’s interstellar trade.”

It's as done as done gets around here

There is a manilla envelope in my backpack to be mailed tomorrow to Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Here's to hoping for the best and expecting the worst.

Almost there.

I think I need to accept the fact that the manuscript will never be perfect. That no matter how many times I read through it, I will always find something that I think can be written better. The question is, how many times can I rewrite something before it doesn't make the story substantially better?

I don't know. But I think I'm getting close.

Really close.

On the plus side, despite the fact that the story is almost 4,000 words longer than my initial draft, I think it makes more sense and is a tighter story. Giving the characters a history has helped immensely. Thanks for the feedback, Mike.

Like a rock to the cranium

Story done...bad headache...must take out garbage.

More tomorrow.

Revision

I spent one evening several weeks ago (well, an evening and a few wee hours of the morning) writing my short story now titled The Cowboy Dance. I've spent the last week and then some revising it.

I am especially grateful to my draft readers who pointed out awkward shifts in POV and things that just didn't make sense. I've corrected most of those problems relatively easily.

My larger challenge is in strengthening the characters. While the piece is technically a science fiction short story (it does, after all, contain aliens), the majority of the narrative is driven by the main, human characters. I wanted the story to be this way. I wanted the creatures from another world to be truly alien; I didn't want you, the reader, to be able to interpret their actions or motives. Truthfully, I don't want to know, myself.

As a consequence, the strength of the story lives and dies with the human element. I freely admit, I'm not exceptionally gifted as this particular version of writing and certain scenes in the first draft were...lacking. So, I've been working on changing that.

The bones of the story remain essentially unchanged. I have been struggling to add more of a history for the protagonist, Colin. I want you, the reader, to not only know why he's doing what he's doing, I want you to understand how he feels as well. Without that emotion, well, the end just falls flat.

I will hopefully finish it in the next day or so, then it's off to...somewhere...to see what a journal thinks of it.

Wish me luck.