This and that

• The check was in the mail today from Analog (Dell Publications, actually) for Flotsam.  Still no word on publication date, but then that’s from another office.  I’m ever so pleased with the payment,  and I’m excited about the sale; but the numbers on the check — $360 — show why a writer can’t make a living selling genre fiction.   Even so, Analog!  Woot!

• The Best of Everyday Fiction Two is on the shelf now.  I have four stories in it — I Must to the Barber’s Chair, In His Prime,  Oh, Woman of Easy Virtue and Upon The Doorsteps.  The title is linked.  Check it out; you won’t be sorry.   It’s a great collection from a great publication.  Congratulations, Camille.  You’ve hit a home run again.

• I’m on target for 150, 000 words this year. 14,500 since January 1 and three short stories completed — Crossing the Barrens, a westernesque fantasy that features a medicine show with God as its chief shill; Cretaceous on Ice, a tongue-in-cheek eccentric inventor tale that feels a lot like the SF stories I grew up with, and The Night Bus Doesn’t Stop Downtown on Mondays, Anymore, a moody bit of flash fiction set in Seattle.  The first two are already in the mail.  I’m still polishing Night Bus.
  

Doing Rustycon

The last few days, I’ve been processing the experience of participating at Rustycon as  an attending professional.   Here are some thoughts:

• I sat on six panels — one on Friday and five on Saturday — and had a scheduled reading Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m.   Preparing for it all felt a bit like work, which I suppose it is.
• Four of the panels were a hoot — they were well attended, there was lots of questions and audience participation and the other panelists were fun and challenging to talk to.  My favorite was the Friday night session on getting published.   My fellow panelist — John Hedtke — writes technical non-fiction and has published 26 books.  It was a spirited and funny sixty minutes.
• Two of the panels — I won’t say which two — were not so much fun.  One in particular was painful.   in the first minutes, a woman in the audience asked a question about research and then would not let anyone on the panel provide a complete answer. She kept talking, interrupting, wouldn’t let anyone else in the audience get in a coherent word, and there was no polite way we could shut her up.  After a time, people began leaving.  Some of the other panel members looked as if they wished they could leave.  I know I wanted to.
• My tight schedule didn’t give me a lot of time to wander around and see what else was being offered.  I did get a chance late Saturday to chat awhile with Michael Ehart, who was also there as an attending pro.  The more I get a chance to talk with him, the more I like him.  I think Michael is as serious as I am about making this writing thing work.  I wish him much luck and hope I keep running into him.
• Since Rustycon was here in Seattle, I commuted from home — 12 miles each way.  I suspect I missed out on a lot of the convention color by not staying at the hotel — the Airport Marriott.  I’m planning on attending two more SF conventions in Seattle this spring — Potlatch in March and Norwescon in April.  The folks at Norwescon have already invited me to participate as an attending professional.  If I can afford it, I hope to stay the weekend at the host hotels.
• Sunday morning was a disappointment.  I had decided to read Flotsam, my story that will appear in Analog sometime this year.  I prepped hard for that thirty-minute session.  Rehearsed reading the story, promoted it as much as I could during my panels and handed out business cards and flyers to people I bumped into between panel sessions.  I was pumped for it.  Nobody showed up.  I understand that I have to build an audience, that people will come to appreciate my work if it’s supposed to be.  Even so, it was difficult to sit there in that empty room and wait.
• I need to call upon my training and experience in marketing.  I hadn’t really considered that before attending Orycon in November.  The people who attend SF conventions, and show up for the panels on the writing track, are my target audience.  I’m offering them a product — me and my stories.  I can’t expect them to buy that product if I don’t promote it.

At Rustycon 27

Next weekend, I’ll be at Rustycon — the science fiction convention held here in Seattle — and as more than one of the crowd.

The Rustycon folks were kind enough to invite me to participate as an attending professional.  And so, I will be appearing in six panel discussions — moderating one of them — and reading some of my work.

I’m looking forward to it.

I have a new acquaintance to thank for the connection; two new acquaintances, actually.  I’ve come to think of them as my Amtrak friends.

I met Fred and Johanna McLain on the train to Portland at the end of November, on the way to Orycon.  They were across the aisle, we struck up a conversation when Fred asked me about a book I was reading, and it turned out that they were on their way to Orycon, too.

Fred’s been active in the Pacific Northwest science convention scene for years and he seems to know everybody.  And he mentioned me to some of them.  And that lead to an invitation to Rustycon.

Thank you, Fred.  New friends are a joy of discovery.

Anyway, I’ve got one panel Friday night, five on Saturday, on everything from world-building to sex scenes in science fiction.  They’re spread throughout the day so I’ll be hopping.  And I will present a thirty-minute reading Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m.

If you’re going to be at Rustycon, come introduce yourself; I’d love to say hello and talk writing for a bit.

And stop by to hear me read, if you can.  My voice echoes something awful in an empty room.

A Tithe of Blood

Work progresses on my novel, which has undergone another title change.  It’s now A Tithe of Blood.

I’ve written 19,000 words in the past three weeks.

That’s not quite 1,000 words a day, writing every day.  I’m pleased with that, particularly considering it was over the Christmas holidays.

The exciting thing is that as the story progresses, where it is headed becomes clearer and clearer and the major characters are stepping up and telling me more and more about themselves and how they will interact with each other.

I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer, for me discovery of the details has always been one of the best parts of writing fiction.  I can keep those details organized in my head for a short story, but I learned in the first two novels that i wrote — Lifting Up Veronica and August Company — that that sort of thing can be overwhelming in a longer work.

So I did an outline before I began this project, made a lot of notes, too, because as an SF novel, I can’t fall back onto the real world to remember all the little things.

You shouldn’t get the wrong idea.  I don’t have a two-inch-thick stack of index cards or a binder thick with pages.  My outline is 386 words, set up in seven paragraphs.  You know; this will happen here and that will happen there. But for me it is a spotlight brightening the darkness ahead.

Who could have thought that building something with a prepared blueprint could be so much fun.

The pace may pick up, it may slow down (I’ve got a lot of retrofitting to do as new ideas occur), but I am convinced I will have a first draft (probably closer to 75,000 words that the 65,000 I first projected) completed by the first of June 2010.

And I hope to be able to take it to the University of Kansas next July to workshop in Kij Johnson’s Novel Workshop that is a part of Jim Gunn’s annual SF Writers Workshop.

The downside of this whole spiel is that I haven’t written a single word on a short story since the first week in December.

I want to finish the novel, but I don’t want to give up on shorts, so I’m going to strike a balance for 2010.  My goal is going to be 5,000 words a week, with three days devoted to A Tithe of Blood and two days spent on short stories.

If I can maintain that pace, by the end of June, when it’s time to head for Kansas, I will have completed the novel AND have 50,000 words written toward short stories.  That’s nine to twelve stories.  We’ll see how it goes.

Groucho Marx wasn’t always right

My membership application to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America was approved today.

This is a milestone for me, right up there with my Writers of the Future win for Coward’s Steel and Analog accepting Flotsam. Those were two of the three qualifying short stories that I needed for membership, BTW.

The third was At Both Ends, at Flash Fiction Online, which was my first professional-rate sale. My heartfelt thanks to Jake Freivald, editor at FFO, for that one.

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Groucho reference, he once said that he wouldn’t want to belong to any organization that would have him as a member.

This once, I can’t agree.