Life is not fair

The novel continues to make slow but steady progress. Now closing in on 20,000 words, and up to scene 11 (of 66). Not spectacularly fast, but I’m generally happy with what I’ve got, and the characters are fleshing themselves out nicely. Working out the moral purpose for each character really helps with understanding the purpose of each scene. And once you know the why, the rest of the scene comes easily.

One of my ex-students from Mahidol University (where I used to work) emailed me yesterday. She took my freshmen comp course, and also my Creative Writing course (about two years later, I think). She didn’t tell me this in the class, but she was working on a book at the time. She’s now in her final semester at Mahidol, and her book has been picked up by a publisher in Thailand. Which is awesome and grin-inducing news!

Now, if only I can sell my own book . . .

It’s now a full week since I did any running. The knee feels fine–some very minor twinges yesterday, but only to the same level as my hips and ankles, which always feel a bit wobbly (the perils of weighing 200 pounds). I could walk fast, and the joint felt loose and easy most of the time. So hopefully I should be good for the Berkhamsted Half Marathon on Sunday.

I really want to go out for a run–but exacerbating the knee and turning it into a long term injury would really suck, so better to lay off now than have it plaguing me for months. Patience, patience…

On the other hand, I’ve finished 6 chapters in my novel, so at least the break is good for something.

First day of drafting the novel: 2093 words. Hard, but enjoyable. First chapter done.

Just stumbled across this from the Black Gate blog. Apparently at the World Fantasy Convention, some people were mocking the work of another writer. Their reason was an excerpt taken out of context from her novel, which did sound kind of silly.

All ancient history now, but it does make me wonder why speculative fiction writing seems filled with small-minded types who like to snipe. Having been both target (google my name, you’ll find it) and sniper in the past (but no more), I can understand why people get like that, but why is it so common in SFF?  But who knows, maybe it’s the case in other genres too?

People need to be expansive, not contractive–and holding up someone’s work to ridicule in public is about as contractive as you can get. They need to get out and run more. A good ten mile run would blow out all that negative energy.

Mind you, Black Gate seems a thoughtful and snipe-free place. So maybe it’s just some people and not a generic thing.

Two days of rest now with no running. Icing five/six times a day, Deep Heat rubs, etc. etc. Seems to be working–I had no pain today while walking to Grandma’s house with the kids. Still clicking and sore, but the signs are good. I’ve got more than a week before the Berkhamsted Half, so with any luck, I should be okay to run. I’m probably still going to stick to a run 5 walk 1 pace, though. (About 11:30 per mile, I’m guessing.)

And for writing, I’ve been working hard this past couple of days, really getting back into the swing of things. I now have five short stories on submission (all to pro markets–gotta try for the money first*). And tomorrow, I’m going to start drafting the novel that’s been in outline for months. I know the story so well by now that the actual typing shouldn’t be that hard.

I hit something of a milestone yesterday–I finished the first short story I’ve written since being diagnosed with melanoma. It’s taken me just over eighteen months to accept the fact that I have cancer.

Scratch that. It’s taken me eighteen months to accept the fact that I have advanced, incurable cancer and will probably die. Writing it down like that may seem cold, but hiding from the truth doesn’t make it go away. The survival rates for Stage IV melanoma (what I have) are dismal. 10-15% 5 year survival dismal. Not quite as bad as pancreatic cancer, but still pretty bad. The half life of Stage IV melanoma patients is about 9 months.

On the other hand, it’s now been 18 months, and I’m not dead. Eighteen months out, of the ten hypothetical people who were diagnosed at the same time as me, seven of them are now dead. I’m not. I have no symptoms; I feel good, and although the tumour is still in my brain, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything very much at the moment.

So I’m trying to stop myself from waiting to get my next symptom, and start living my life in the way that I would want to live it if I didn’t have cancer. Part of my effort to stick two fingers up to cancer goes into my running, but another part goes into writing.

Writing makes me feel complete. It gives me purpose, focus, and takes me out of myself. Everyone needs a creative outlet, and writing is mine. Not writing was making me feel like I was waiting to die.

So . . . I started cracking the whip on myself last week, and managed to finish a new draft for a short story that’s been bugging me for (literally) years. The old drafts had something, but they didn’t quite work. A little while ago, I posted about finishing an outline for a story; in that post I said that writing it was the easy part. Well, the writing is now done, and the story is solid. It needs sanding and polishing, but that’s even easier than writing.

It feels good to have completed something. Editing, polishing, and critting should take another few weeks, and then I can get it out on submission.

My friend Howard A. Jones’ book is coming out in the UK soon (it’s already out in the US). Having read some of his work, I know it’s going to be awesome–and if you don’t believe me, just read the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly.

Go! Buy it now!

I’ve written a lot of short stories and novels over the past five/six years. A lot of them were crap. But, for short stories at least, I’m now at the stage where I can be reasonably confident of selling each story I write. Part of this is writing better, but a lot more of it comes down to recognising problems and knowing how to fix them.

In the past year or so, I’ve realized that the main problem many stories have (and the most difficult thing to correct) is not sloppy prose. Many books for writers focus on this aspect of writing. But it’s both the easiest to fix and the least important. Just read the first chapter of ‘The Bourne Identity’ to understand what truly awful prose is, and how it has very little to do with the story.

Nor is the main problem character background or depth. I’ve read plenty of stories with rounded, fully believable characters . . . but the story didn’t work. Rounded believable characters are great–but so are cartoon sketch characters. R.E. Howard’s Conan is a caricature . . . but R.E. Howard’s stories are still being reprinted (again and again and again), more than 70 years after he shot himself.

No, the main problem with writing short fiction is part that’s least visible to the reader, the underlying structure of the narrative. There are as many ways of thinking about this underlying structure as there are critics/writing coaches. Not all of them work, and some are frankly ridiculously formulaic, but the best sketches of how structure works can explain like nothing else why one story works, while another very similar fails utterly. (I’m not going to write about the arrangement of structure here. If you’re interested in what worked for me, buy this book).

And when you finally get hold of the underlying structure of a story, its moral trajectory, then everything else falls into place.

Last night, I was working on an outline for a short story. I’d been wrestling with it for months–I’d drafted the whole story twice and it still wasn’t quite working. It was okay, but it just didn’t feel right. It felt clunky, contrived, a little clumsy. And I couldn’t work out what it was. It wasn’t until I ditched the entire draft and started again from the central moral conflict in the story that everything fell into place. And it was like fitting together a jigsaw; click, snick, and everything was together and locked tight.

A great feeling. Now all I’ve got to do is type it, but that’s the easy part.

My short stories HALLOWEEN: COMPRISING A CAUTIONARY ACROSTIC OF NINE BEDTIME STORIES FOR READING TO THE TIRESOME OR DISOBEDIENT CHILD is going to be published in the October 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy. The cover for the issue is below:

Realms of fantasy october 2010 cover

Now I want to know why I’m at the bottom again. I’ve got the polar opposite of star billing. Why? Whhhhhhhhhyyyyy?