Thursday 29 September 2016

A Minor Milestone


Last time I posted about persistence, about keeping your work out there and constantly under consideration at appropriate venues, and this week’s submissions have certainly moved my total figures along. As of today – listening to the rain and wind out there as Adelaide experiences the third wave of the “fifty-year storm” for which September 2016 will long be remembered – I have exceeded forty stories on submission.

In the past it seemed that the more rapidly one submitted, the faster the rejections arrived, and that is probably still the case depending on the accuracy with which material is matched to venue, but lately I seem to be getting that part of the equation right(er) more often than not, and the floods of turnarounds I saw in the early days have rather abated. That does not mean acceptances are arriving at the same rate instead – would that they were! – but at least stories under consideration are running their full course, and sometimes more besides.

I have more stories on the way, in notes, in writing, in polishing, so the story-telling machine is still in force, though I’ve noticed I’m spending more time on the process of submission and less on writing now. With a large collection of material, some of it still to see the light of day on the submission round, this is perhaps a good thing.

I’m happy to continue in this vein, seeking out markets and offering stories, and if the day comes I have fifty out there, I’ll post that too!


Cheers, Mike Adamson

Monday 26 September 2016

Velocity and Persistence


It’s tempting to see magic numbers, but they may only have significance to ourselves. When passing one hundred submissions I saw it as something of a milestone: this many submissions over that time period, being such-and-such a volume of work shown to so-many markets… It’s all statistical, really, but sometimes numbers help us see what’s happening in even the most anti-numerical field.

Persistence is certainly part of it. I wondered if I would be totally jaded and ready to pack it in if I hit 100 submissions without having made my grand arrival and been starting to make a living at it. But the game is far from linear, and I seem to be made of tougher stuff: I was as enthusiastic and committed at 100 submissions as at ten, and at time of posting number 200 is not far away, with plenty of great new stories appearing and new markets to try out for fit.

Getting another short-listing the same day as such a milestone also doesn’t hurt! It’s the pat on the back that makes up for so much of the closed-door, no-thanks stuff that is the daily reality of a writer trying to break into the market.

Given the overall industry statistics, even the most optimistic writer could hardly see the process of finding print as anything less than tough. The sheer number of good writers today, churning out very good stories, against the range of applicable markets means it is not going to get any easier; meanwhile, from the perspective of the reader/consumer, there has never been greater choice or more access to an ocean of speculative fiction, so it has to be a win-win. The market is here to stay, so the aspiring writer must be in it for at last the medium-haul to make any impression.

For myself, I’m happy to maintain pressure in every way I can – pressure on myself to write often and to the best of my ability, pressure on the market in terms of making sure I have something appropriate on offer to the best publications whenever they’re reading, whether it be magazines, anthologies or competitions. I call this velocity or volume – how many submissions have I made this week?

Cheers,


Mike Adamson

Friday 16 September 2016

An Honourable Mention!

Galaxy Press run an ongoing competition for aspiring science fiction writers, the “Writers of the Future” Contest (there’s a corresponding artists’ contest too). The three top places of each quarter are rejudged for a yearly grand winner and they all go into an anthology for the year. The contest is open to anyone who has not yet been published at full professional rates (at least US 6c/word), and it has been running for many years (the latest anthology I believe is volume 32.).

This message was waiting for me when I checked messages a few minutes ago:

"Dear Entrant,

"Your story has been judged and is a Silver Honorable Mention for the 3rd quarter of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest..."

Well! How about that! The three top places win cash prizes and publication, but to score silver in the honourable mentions suggests my story placed fifth in the quarter's judging, which may have been hundreds of stories – not a bad achievement! I'll be entering again, for sure! I'll post the certificate when it arrives...


Cheers, Mike   

Thursday 15 September 2016

Dealing with the Rejection Monster


How do we do it? Is it a case of fortitude or is there some technique? When I was a kid I was told to “develop a thick skin” if things bothered me, an adult buzz term which was all very well but nobody ever said how.

We write our stories and offer them up to public scrutiny, knowing perfectly well we may suffer a hundred rejections for every acceptance. That’s 99 turn-downs, 99 instances of being passed over, the door closed, the cold shoulder: we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t feel at times that, just maybe, we’re not as good as we thought we were.

Coping with rejection is of course a professional skill. The cartoon above was published 43 years ago, in David Gerrold’s The Story of One of Star Trek’s Most Popular Episodes, The Trouble With Tribbles (Bantam, 1973). I have always thought it so pertinent, the supplicant receiving his brainchild back on a toasting fork, burnt black – the critical opinion of the powers that be who stand in judgement over the creative output of the individual writer. You have to have humour to survive, some of the time!

Electronic submission has truncated a process of weeks or months into days or weeks – and who hasn’t had an overnight rejection? Or a rejection in hours? Trying not to be cynical about it, or indeed angry, is a mark of professionalism – I say try, nobody is perfect. But professionalism must also be a process of placing a rejection in perspective – there are entirely legitimate reasons for turning down a submission, and they can grade to very fine levels of choice on the part of a first-reader or editor. Often rejections have nothing to do with the literary merit of a work and everything to do with business – it may be the marketplace is virtually out of acquisition budget this week and can afford to buy something 4000 words long – not the 6000 yours was. Or they bought something on a similar theme last week and simply can’t buy another and stockpile it until long enough has elapsed they can reasonably revisit the theme. To do so may also not be fair to the writer, who might (just perhaps) see their work in print much sooner elsewhere. And if the rejection is on literary grounds, the opinion remains subjective and the next marketplace may feel differently. Probably very few stories are bought on their first submission (while, oddly enough, at least some seem to be shortlisted on them…).

Whatever the reason, one is left to beard the rejection dragon in its cave on an ongoing basis. In the age of online submission and immediate communication, every time we log into emails we face the prospect of a rejection. I check messages two or three times a day, often I have my email program open in the background, so the 99% probability of being turned away is always in play. It preys on the mind to some extent, the anxiety of looking to see what has been turned down by whom today. I don’t get rejections everyday but my worst day was four – hard, for sure, and it’s happened more than once. The opposite also holds true, though – when an acceptance comes in, the charge lasts all day and an enthusiasm to see what happens tomorrow is very much in play.

But there is always another story on the go, another inspiration, another chance to refine the craft of writing, and hopefully turn out a gem which this time might please first-readers and editor too. So out it goes, fingers are crossed, and one waits for the cycle to play out. Is the piece matched properly to marketplace requirements? Check the boxes… Length, correct; subject matter, yes; age-group orientation, fine; now is your style quite what this marketplace prefers? Does your take or twist “work” for the first-reader, or does it do exactly the opposite? Did the first-readers like it but the editor not? A tapestry of variables comes into play and the writer must be aware that when every marketplace is snowed under with submissions from writers all aspiring to be professionals, any reason is good enough to pass on anything.

Fatalism is perhaps the key, not a morbid negativity but an understanding of the vagaries of the industry and enough humility to allow that one’s style may indeed rub others the wrong way, while both your style and the first reader’s expectations each remain perfectly defensible. Some markets may simply be impenetrable and will stay that way because your output is ill-suited to the formula they have found works for them artistically and at a commercial level. It doesn’t mean you write bad stories but it does mean they’ll be published somewhere else.


Allowing that one has reached a certain level of proficiency, it comes down to business: marketplaces are in the business of selling magazines, writers are in the business of selling stories, neither can succeed without the other but the negotiation between them is an often-lethal mating dance in which the writer’s aspirations are rewarded a minute fraction of the time. We may not like it, but it is the way the world works and the regimen we are obliged to learn.

Monday 12 September 2016

First Exposures – Update III

I’m thrilled to report that my short story “The Winds of Time” has been accepted for publication in the forthcoming anthology “The Chronos Chronicle,” from Indie Authors Press.

I wrote this one earlier in the year, based on a vivid dream I had – I dreamed I was going somewhere but something odd was happening with time, and thereby hung a tale. The anthology is devoted to matters of time, so it seems I matched material to market very well this time.

I’ll post details when the anthology comes up for release next year.


Cheers, Mike Adamson

Thursday 8 September 2016

Writing in the MTV Era


Getting past the gatekeepers means fulfilling their expectations in certain critical ways, and a symptom of modernity is shortness of attention span. This can easily (conveniently?) be attributed to the 24/7 availability of canned entertainment, music and movies on demand and, especially the former, in bite-sized (byte-size?) chunks. Nothing very long, everything sparkling, all-singing, all-dancing, and changing to something else (but strictly inside the formula) every few minutes.
                  
This can be bad news for the writer, when the public would, by and large, rather watch than read anyway. How many writers have received feedback along the lines of “overplays its material,” “could be shorter,” “drags a bit,” “needs to learn conciseness” or “could do with a good edit?” These are all subjective impressions which boil down to it bored the reader. If it bores the first-reader it is likely to bore the subscribers – at least that’s the theory. It may very well be that first-readers read far more than anyone else and are thus acutely susceptible to the malady, when subscribers may be less so. The fact remains, writers must please first-readers, and therein lies the challenge.

What about proper development? If one is writing within the prescribed length limits of a marketplace, is the marketplace not bound to view a piece on its own merits? If 10, 000 words is available, is it reasonable for first-readers to expect the same pace as from a 2000-worder? Surely the space allows elbowroom for scene setting, character development and backstory in addition to plot? Subjectivity is very much in focus here, as is the current patience of the reader. If one’s story comes up for consideration at the end of a long and difficult day and the reader has just enough patience left for a foot-to-the-floor, tightly-plotted short with conciseness taken to the point of verbal transparency, one’s lush narrative of languid exotica will be binned by the second page because it bored the reader.

This is the luck of the draw, of course, and who knows how often one’s brainchild is turfed back for this very reason? If you will excuse the British Comedy vulgarity, in the last few months I have tried to “write like a hooker’s skirt – short, tight and commercial.” Telling stories in a very small space is one way to avoid boring the reader, but is still no guarantee; focussing on plot to the exception of all else makes for pace but a spartan narrative with difficult-to-relate-to characters; writing first-person personalises the narrative automatically and skips the clumsy space-waster of describing your protagonist, but some markets have started to tire of first person (and present tense) narratives, as if this formulaic trick is wearing thin. I can entirely appreciate that, but if we are not allowed to trick around the demands, we must be allowed to write “properly” – and we need some industry definition of what that means, something likely impossible because this is, after all, a subjective game.

True, much of the popular fiction marketplace came into being as a response to commuters who need reading matter to occupy them on that bus or train journey to and from work, day after day, and the length of material for this large market is ideally suited to what can be read in an hour. That said, there are no few markets which will consider longer pieces, and ideally their readers’ guidelines should be designed around the nature of the longer piece. The fact remains, however, the majority of markets are quoting a sweet spot of 4000 or 5000 words, whether for the constraints of journey time or the active attention span of readers today.

I can’t help blaming MTV. When raised on three-minute song-bytes and thirty-second news features, who wants to read stories which unfold at the pace of (normal? Dated? Old?) human information processing? It’s sad, in a way, as so much is lost when there is no time to smell the roses – the ones only the writer can conceive of, and would like to tell the reader about. The experience of becoming lost in a literary work is in danger of really becoming lost in the impatience of the audience.

At least, that’s my subjective impression!


Cheers, Mike Adamson

Friday 2 September 2016

Theme and Volume


It is often said that the regimen of writing short stories and the regimen of writing novels are worlds apart. As a writer of both I can certainly agree, and say that each is a technique and approach governed by the very space one has to work in.

A novel has room to move – none to waste, for sure, “padding” is a dubious commodity in this day and age, as attention spans grow ever shorter. While it may be necessary to do so if a publisher has specified a novel, already contracted, must be a certain length, publishers are also just as likely to set a short work in a type size for the visually impaired and fill the book with whitespace to force enough pages to make the work impressive on the sales shelf. None of this has anything to do with the craft of writing the book, of course, and the writer of novels expects to be able to adequately develop characters, situations and back-stories to extract maximum entertainment value from the project. Nothing need be omitted.

Short stories are a whole other universe, especially in this age of flash. Magazine marketplaces specify their length range and many are very strict about it, some even have auto-rejection of electronic submissions with lengths outside the declared range. This fosters the skill of writing to length, and encourages conciseness, the truncation of events, focus on specifics, and how to craft a character in the minimum number of words. Often one finds oneself omitting description of people – especially in the currently very popular first person narrative – how is a character supposed to describe him or herself? It’s not natural and tends to subtract itself.

When lengths become very constrained, 1000 words, say, or even 500, the art of conciseness is foregrounded. A competent story can be told in 1000 words – memorable, with rich details, atmosphere, a strong character or two, but nothing can be said more than once and adjectives are at a premium. It’s an artform, yes, and plays to the short attention span of the age, but there is a bone in the writer’s head which is reluctant to expend great ideas on blink-and-you’ll-miss-it length fiction. Magazines only want your best ideas, and they want them condensed to the minimum number of words for which they will be paying (drop out words like “that” and “had” and excise the passive voice with religious zeal), but the writer may well far rather expand upon great ideas, do them full justice and be paid accordingly. Unfortunately, this is a rare situation and writers cannot expect magazines to pay them a professional rate for being verbose. The definition of verbosity has become tighter with time, resulting in a more economical wage bill for magazines and inevitably freeing up space to include more writers on average, while the writer is obliged to work more conscientiously in order to compete.

But, as a writer, how should one prioritise which idea makes a great short story and which should be a novel? A single pivotal event from a novel can be dramatised as a short story, while here and there one finds inspired short stories with plots which would make great novels. Is a short story more immediately saleable than a novel? Yes, and that alone counsels brevity – commit that idea to bytes, submit it and get on with the next. Novels are a protracted affair involving many long hours of writing, rewriting, editing and proofing, agency representation and potentially years of submission time, for statistically low odds of a placement. Perhaps this is why the impulse is to funnel all ideas into short story format, even if it means brutal simplification of what could have been lush and expansive.

Of course, if the short story is placed, and especially if it is appreciated by readers and/or critics, the writer has the option to expand upon it. This is by no means unknown, an example which comes easily to mind is David Brin’s The Tides of Kithrup, first published in Analog (May, 1981) and which was expanded into the award-winning novels Sundiver and Startide Rising. Aspiring professionals must always be on the lookout for such potential, and the placement of a work is not necessarily the end of its development.

The short story format also lends itself to the writer with limited time to devote to the craft – a project can be conceived and completed, at least the first draft, in one sitting, and a writer can amass a canon of work with which to tackle the market relatively quickly. Is one obliged to fire off cherished ideas in short, machine-gun-like bursts? In the end, yes, it is more than likely a necessary evil of writing today.

But for the born storyteller there is always another idea forthcoming – ten seconds of daydreaming, which can strike anywhere, anytime, can see the notes for a new piece being frantically typed, and dreams, due perhaps to their vivid nature, are another valuable wellspring of inspiration – this is a theme to return to. Suffice to say, while some ideas may very well have made grand novels, and the short story writer is justified in feeling he or she is, quite often, too often, trying to force a camel through the eye of a needle, the short story is an artform all its own, and great ideas are not singular: there will always be another – and another, and another.


Cheers, Mike Adamson