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.

I’ve changed my name to Anxious

I swore I wouldn’t talk about this until I had something more definitive, honest to God, I took an oath. But the waiting and not saying is just more than I can stand.

I’m not sleeping much, obsessing about this. I’m eating too much, what I always do when I’m faced with something important that I can’t control.

I’ve been writing, but I’m not finishing anything. I have five stories started right now, but I get to 1,000 or 1,500 words and it feels as if I’m dragging heavy weights.

And I’ve been haunting my mailbox, too; so much so that the mail carrier flinches when she sees me.

Here’s the situation.

Last July, I attended Jim Gunn’s SF Writers Workshop in Kansas and workshopped a story that wound up being titled Flotsam. It’s hard science fiction, a near-future story about a work team in low earth orbit. I don’t write much hard SF and I sweated .44 caliber bullets doing the research for it.

In mid-July, after the workshop and at Professor Gunn’s suggestion, I sent the story off to Analog. Editor Stan Schmidt requires hard paper submissions, so I knew there would be a wait before I knew anything. Maybe a long wait.

So, here’s what I’ve been holding in.

The third week in September, I got a letter from Dr. Schmidt saying that he liked the story and that he wanted to use it in his magazine, if I was willing to do a minor rewrite.

Would I be willing to do a rewrite to have one of my stories appear in Analog? Might as well ask if I would be willing to go on breathing.

It really was minor, though. In fact, all I had to do was insert five paragraphs that I had taken out in my final edit. I put the revised piece in the mail a couple days later and sat down to wait.

I haven’t heard anything yet. It’s been six weeks, but in this business, that’s nothing. I’ve talked to other writers who have had work published in Analog and they’ve all told me I just have to be patient.

But this is one of only a few times I’ve submitted a story via snail mail — there aren’t many magazines that require that anymore — and it’s the first time I’ve gotten a conditional acceptance from a major SF market.

I know it’s stupid to fixate upon this to the point that it interferes with my writing. With my life, to be honest. But I’m new enough to this profession to be anxious about the outcome. It’s possible this sort of thing may become commonplace at some point in my future, but right now this is a big deal for me.

It will be my third professional sale, which means I can apply for membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America. It’s validation that my Writers of the Future win wasn’t just a fluke. And, most important, it’s frakkin’ Analog. I’ve only been reading the magazine for fifty years.

But I’ll be good. I swear I will. I’ll wait patiently. I’ll focus on my writing; get it back on track. I won’t pounce upon the mail carrier the moment she steps down from her truck. I just hope word arrives soon, though.

Before I’m forced to resort to slicing open live chickens and reading entrails.

26 Monkeys

This is a tad late, but then I’ve never claimed to be the sort who is up to the minute on every event and happening.

Kij Johnson, who also lives and writes somewhere here in Seattle, won the World Fantasy Award November 1st at the World Fantasy Convention for her short story, 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss. The story appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine July 2008.

I met Kij last July in Kansas, where she was teaching the novel-writing half of Jim Gunn’s SF Writers Workshop. At the time, she was waiting for the World Science Fiction Convention to roll around because 26 Monkeys was also nominated this year for a Hugo.

There was stiff competition for the Hugo, including another monkey story, Evil Robot Monkey, by Mary Robinette Kowal, which, BTW, is a dynamite piece of flash fiction. Ted Chiang won for Exhalation, a great piece of hard science fiction.

Yeah; 26 Monkeys is that good. It was also up for the Nebula and won Asimov’s Readers’ Award for 2008.

Any way, Kij is a funny lady, a great writer and a swell improvisational performer. Read her story; you’ll be a better person for it.

Congratulations on the win, Kij. You should have won all three this year.

An update

The folks at Strange Horizons said “no” to Stuff of the Old Gods, the story I brought back from Jim Gunn’s SF Writers Workshop.  So I tweaked the ending a bit and pushed it back out into the cold to go knocking at the door of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

I’ll let you know whether of not they let it in.

And Downunder, Upon Whom the Pale Moon Gleams, made it through to the third round of review at Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.  So more waiting and the editors there say only about one in three stories make it through the third round and into the magazine.

More to come there.

Thoughts on workshopping and the Campbell Conference

There is a morning session today to wind up the Campbell Conference and everyone will be going off in our own directions early this afternoon. It’s been a busy and fruitful two weeks. Something of a paradox, as well, for it seems as if they lasted forever AND came to an end much too quickly. I meet so many great folks here and made a couple of friendships that I think will become long-term.

The workshop, which ended Friday afternoon, was everything I had hoped it would be. I brought three stories and I’m taking them home as three completely different tales. Better, I believe. The first that was workshopped, A Prayer to Saint Barbara, has become Fat-Bottom Girl.  That name is a misnomer. It is slimmer and tighter than it was two weeks ago and it is ready, I believe, to submit to the professional markets.

Jim Gunn thinks so, too.  Thursday, at the completion of its second critique, he suggested that I send it off to Stan Schmidt at Analog.

So Tuesday, when I have settled into place in Seattle, it is going in the mail. I most likely will change the title before that; I don’t even want to think about a Fair Use lawsuit from the folks that hold the copyright to Queen’s big hit, but whatever I wind up calling it, I have hopes for this story.

I think I’ve made a breakthrough in my writing, thanks to Professor Gunn. He has a comfortable but incisive style of teaching and he is such a gentleman.  When he wants to make a point, he begins his remarks with, “It seems to me ..”  I figured out quickly that when he said that, something worthwhile would follow.

The story-telling style he suggests is deceptively simple. Write in scenes of 800-1000 words. Start the story with the crisis situation from which the protagonist escape. Decide what the story is about and remain true to that theme throughout the narrative.  Of course, it’s not the only way to write a story but it is one successful way to do so and I think I got it.  We shall see.

My second story, As A Wind Among the Reeds, has morphed into Stuff of the Old Gods, using the same techniques.  It has become a better, stronger story, too. It needs just a bit more polishing, but I expect to have it in the mail to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine within the week.

The third story, which I’m now calling Fractal Jack, is going to need more work. Only 5,000 of it’s 9,000+ words survived critique, but I believe I see the path that it must follow, too. It will be in the mail, too, before the end of the month, along with Being Abednego, which I was able to plot from its new beginning to the end, using Gunn’s suggestions.  It’s earmarked for Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

The Campbell Conference, so named to honor John Campbell, long-time editor of Analog, was a worthwhile experience, too.  There were some great round-table discussions (and casual evening chats, I met a ton of people who are involved in the business of writing and publishing science fiction and I had a chance to talk with published authors James Alan Gardner, who won the Sturgeon Award for his short fiction, Raygun: A Love Story, as well as Ian MacLeod and Cory Doctorow, who shared this year’s Campbell award for best novel. MacLeod for Song of Time and Doctorow for Little Brother. Great fun.

Tomorrow morning it is back to real life but I’m taking so much back to Seattle with me.