Psychedelia Gothique

  Life After ADD The problem with proverbs is that they become trite through sheer repetition.  I probably heard the phrase “God is in the details” a dozen times before I really thought about what it means. “The Devil is in the details” is more cautionary and probably does a better job of getting to the point, ie: the details can fuck you up. Lack of attention to detail can condemn your work – your entire oeuvre – to the Devil’s eternal slushpile. I was born before Attention Deficit Disorder was coined, but over the years, I have figured out why the word ‘disorder’ is contained in the description. I used to feel proud that I couldn’t read any given book or see a movie more than once. I convinced myself that my low boredom threshold was a good thing. It kept me looking for the new and unique. My “Imagination above all things” philosophy is almost certainly what drove me to read and write science fiction. The prevalence of ghosts and vampires and werewolves in horror is almost...

Modern media makes it so easy to publish a novel, I figure in a few years anyone who’s ever put pen to paper will be able to publish one if they have a mind to. Can’t spell? No problem, here’s a super duper spell checker that can translate into 145 languages and spell correctly in all of them. And clean up your grammar. Can’t come up with a story? Just enter a few ideas and the AI will come up with a story for you – one that’s never been told before. You’ll just need to tweak it and call it your own. Don’t know anything about typesetting? Well, organizations like Draft 2 Digital already have that figured out – right here, right now. Just go to their website, upload your story – include the cover you bought at the buy-a-cover site and presto, Pick a date and your book will be available from all the retailers, and it will cost you nothing but future royalties. Brilliant. Every aspect of the writer’s craft is becoming automated. Copy-editing and proof-reading software already ex...

Not long ago, I was going on about the importance of endings and how the recognition of the weaknesses in my original ending in The Human Template drove me to rewrite it. All well and good, but it leads into the next topic – on the dangers of rewriting. There are several levels of rewriting.  We're in home renovation mode lately at our house, so it was the metaphor that sprung most easily to mind. If you think of a novel as a house: 1)     There’s the complete teardown and subsequent replacement with a whole new structure. 2)      There’s your regular reno with repainting inside and out, plastering, filling of plot holes, and maybe a bit of roofing or sanding of hardwood. 3)       There’s the room by room remodeling meant to beautify and improve the existing structure that requires moving of furniture and selective repairs. 4)       And then there’s the spruce-up with new door handles, curtains, light fixtures and th...

When fiction defines you, but stories refuse to gel – plots sit leaden, deaf and numb; characters drift aimless, without goals; sentences stumble, half-formed and forlorn toward the trash. When interruptions rattle like machine guns from surrounding trenches drawing your gaze, tautening nerves; muddying thoughts, pummeling your muse. When demands come barking, bulletins whistling through the air you dive for cover, behind telephones and monitors whiteboards and income statements – lest your senses are left splattered on the wall. Distractions, distractions, provoking your reactions. The enemy is in the walls, the foundations. Unclear orders squawk through tinny speakers. Victims lie screaming at your feet! Instead of raging, hysterical and distraught. Try moving softly into shadows Drawing colours down, allowing words to lose themselves in play mind-dancing through minefields, cavorting through ordered ranks their trails of mischief flutterin...

Breaking Writers Block: Part 2 Writing quickly and writing slowly tap into totally different parts of your brain. If you are usually an ordered and methodical writer, you may find it incredibly useful and productive to cut loose.  Different Approaches to Writing Really Fast  Fast mode, for me, is when the ideas are coming faster than my mental ability to express them properly and I desperately scramble to get words on paper or pixels on screen before losing them completely. Coherence, continuity and common sense are the first things to go out with the window as I struggle to come up with strategies to keep getting some value from the technique. There is value there, even though it may not be apparent at first. With practice, you can learn to control the flow. My top speed is probably about 700 words an hour.  I can imagine someone writing semi-coherently at two or three thousand words and hour. I know people who can type 100 words a minute, but anyone who can think th...

I’ve been working on the final chapter of my novel for a few weeks now. Not that the old one wasn’t working. Of my eighteen beta readers, only one reader picked up the flaws at the climax and they didn’t mention it until literally yesterday. No, I mean it. Yesterday. Literally. The thing that's been on my mind a lot lately is the importance of endings . The other day I tried to track down a Gardner Dozois quotation that made a big impact of me – I think it was from one of his Best SF of the Year anthologies. In it, he mentioned a couple good novels that came out during the year he was reviewing and he paused to contemplate how great they might have been if their endings had been the same quality as the rest of the book. I remember how much it resonated with me because I too had just read several potentially great novels that fell apart or simply petered out when it mattered most – during the climax that ends the book! This is a thing writers do - spend five years writing their ...

Do you know the difference between flotsam and jetsam? Flotsam is wreckage - stuff lost at sea as a direct result of a disaster - whereas Jetsam is useful stuff thrown overboard to lighten the load. Flotsam is, at best, useful for keeping survivors briefly afloat, but for the most part it just gives you slivers; while jetsam is the sort of thing beachcombers spend their lives looking for.  Welcome to the Age of Jetsam - where we're all waiting to see what useful things are being jettisoned during the storm we are currently weathering. And what, after all is said and done, might be salvageable.   Even before the pandemic, I heard stories about the sad state of the publishing industry.  Now that retailers in general are in survival mode, with many restaurants, specialty stores, nightclubs, and other businesses surrendering to the economic chaos of the moment, I've started to hear the inevitable stories of authors not getting paid, bookstores and printers going bel...

Are We There Yet? As a young writer, I thought of writing a book as a very cut and dried thing. You type the words “The End” on your manuscript and send it to your agent or publisher and soon your book would appear on shelves with a professional and hopefully attractive cover.   If you were lucky, it would come out in hardcover and become available in libraries. I never factored in the editing, proofreading and all the other things that go into publishing a novel. I remember being astonished when Dean Wesley Smith told me at an SF convention that the “pipeline” from submitting your manuscript to seeing it published direct to paperback was about two years from the time it was sold to a publisher. If you were starting from scratch, the path would be more like two years to find an agent; another year for the agent to sell it; then two more years while it went through the full editing process;   substantive editing, copy editing, proofreading. So five years after typing “The E...

 My very first creative writing class in university focussed on the importance of mastering "The Creative Process." Decades later, the struggle continues! I have gone to the next level in terms of both output and the quality of my writing but I didn't do it by mastering my creative process. Instead, I acknowledged the Creative Process as its own master and learned to work with it.    Over my first 35 years of writing, I produced and sold a few dozen short stories and finished rough drafts of two novels. In the ten years since coming to a partnership agreement with my Creative Process, I have published one volume of short stories and have a second almost ready - having  completed more than a dozen new stories; and  taken four (mostly new) novels to 3rd draft or better. Learning to work more harmoniously with my muse more than quadrupled my output of polished prose and made me twice as good a writer.   If Your Muse Won't Stay on a Leash, Maybe You Can Ge...

While sending out query letters to agents, one thing you are expected to supply is a list of books that are similar to the book you are pitching. With The Human Template , this seemed impossible. One thing my early readers consistently told me was that they had never read anything like my book before. I’m a longtime believer in the adage “There’s nothing new under the Sun,” so I didn’t buy into this notion right away. Yet, it didn’t really help me to come up with any real comparisons. When I first started sending queries, my response was usually to mention a couple of   influences - rather than similar books. One of my favourite genre-books ever is The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick. I consider it to have the best opening of any sff book I have ever read and one of my clear goals is to be as good a writer as Michael Swanwick. Rereading his Vacuum Flowers while I was working on my diptych, I was briefly pumped to feel that my book is both stylistically similar ...

I’ve been writing fiction since Junior High School, took creative writing in university and starting publishing short stories (and a few poems) in the 1980s.  I never tried writing a novel until I was in my forties, and the path was fraught with hazards, the road, littered with unfinished manuscripts. Here we are in 2019, and I am just finishing the fourth draft of my first novel to go beyond first draft. Was it worth all the angst and self-flagellation I’ve put myself through over the years? Am I qualified to make that call before I have actually published it and received reader and market feedback? Can I do it credibly? Hmm. Okay, be that way. I’ll do it anyway. 1)       The best reason to write a novel is because you can’t not write it. You persevere through the obstacles, risk alienating your family (because you need that private time to write), and face 100+ rejections when you try to try to find an agent and a publisher. And then you...