Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
That classic challenge is back:
Do not write a story.
Nope. Mm-mm, don’t do it.
Instead:
Write only an opening sentence.
Not two sentences. Not three. One. Good. Sentence.
Drop the opening sentence in the comments below, and then next week we will make use of some of those sentences for the next challenge. You’ve got one week — due by next Friday, the 17th, noon EST. Get cracking, word-herders.
Draken vae Khellian, bastard cousin of the Monoean King, had risen far from his ignominious origins, becoming both a Bowrank Commander and a member of the Crown’s Black Guard. But when cursed black magic took his wife and his honor away, he fought past his own despair and grief, and carved out a new life in Akrasia. His bloody, unlikely path, chronicled in Exile: The First Book of the Seven Eyes, led him to a new love, and a throne.
Draken has seen too much blood . . . the blood of friends and of enemies alike. Peace is what he wants. Now he must leave his wife and newborn child in an attempt to forge an uneasy peace between the Monoean King and the kingdom of Akrasia. The long bloody shadow of Akrasia’s violent past hangs over his efforts like a shroud. But there are other forces at work. Peace is not something everybody wants . . . not even in the seemingly straightforward kingdom of Draken’s birth.
Factions both known and unknown to Draken vie to undermine his efforts and throw the kingdom into civil war. Forces from his days in the Black Guard prove to be the most enigmatic, and a bloody tide threatens to engulf Draken’s every step.
* * *
The contract for Exile, the book previous to Emissary, had a second, unnamed book in it. I decided to write a sequel because (shh, here’s the super seekrit part) a few years back I had done this really freaky-weird thing that writers aren’t supposed to ever want to do, certainly not without a gun to our heads: I’d written a synopsis.
The book was called Emissary, a story about Draken returning home to the country that exiled him.
I didn’t worry about this aberration too much at the time, and I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone. This was B.C. (before contract) so I was pretty sure the book would never get written. I wouldn’t have to face the shame that I’d actually enjoyed writing the synopsis, that something so wrong could feel so right.
But when it came time to write Emissary I got out the Synopsis-of-Shame and OMG YOU GUYS!! It’s so much easier to write a book when you know what it’s about before you start writing! Who knew?
Not that the SoS solved all my problems.
The second book I ever wrote, a long time before Emissary, I set a goal of 5-10K words a day. I typed my way into carpel tunnel and a sore back, but my fingers hobbled over “the end” inside of two months.
I spent the following year and change cleaning up the mess I’d made.
And the damn book still never sold.
What I learned, not from that book, not from Exile, or any of my other books and novellas, not until Emissary, that even with a synopsis, I write best when I draft slow, good words, usually inside of a thousand a day. I like to write pretty clean. This isn’t to say I don’t need to revise. And hells yeah I’m jealous when people talk about writing 5K or 10K in a day. But my pace and style are just that: mine. They seem to make me relatively happy with what I write.
Will I change my style eventually? Maybe, when I don’t have two beautiful, brilliant, time-sucking, drama-riddled teenagers at home. Plus, I think process is a dynamic thing. Every book is different.
But I had to embrace a glacial pace while working on Emissary. Which meant I had to learn…
Among Chuck’s readers, it’s likely enough to say I’m a Night Shade Author, but in case it isn’t: two months after Exile came out and eight months after I started writing Emissary, Night Shade, a delicious boutique publisher who made beautiful books, shuttered. When the news hit, my agent and I figured chances were good Exile and Emissary would be tied up in bankruptcy court, like, forever.
Not writing a contracted book that will never see the inside of a bookstore is smart business, and I couldn’t concentrate for shit anyway. Fast-forward a few panicked, social-media-buzzed months, and Skyhorse Publishing and Start Media joined forces to buy NSB. When the dust settled in July, I realized I had a late August deadline for a half-finished book, plus three cons and a vacation scheduled. I hated doing it, but I asked my agent to tell Skyhorse, my new publishing house, for a couple more months. She recommended six. (That was wise. Agents Know Things.)
I got a February date and used every scrap of it on the book. (see #2)
And whoa. Was that ever a stressful six months. I’d never written a book with an agent before. Or, you know, editors who plan to give you actual money for your words. And then there are the readers who love your stuff and chat you up at cons and you go home, pretty sure what you’re writing is utter crap and gahhh this sucks, I’m a hack!
Yeah. It’s all about the positive self-talk.
Every time I wrote I imagined my two editors and my agent watching over my shoulder, snickering every so often over particularly bad lines and typos. Sometimes they’d invite reviewers and readers to the party. There were cocktails, black ties, and fancy dresses. Awkward small-talk and jokes at my expense. And I sat there in my pjs, day after day, writing these slow, shitty words with the whole publishing industry jostling me from behind.
Until one day I didn’t.
One day I said fuck it, turned up the lights, blared Closing Time on the hi-fi, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGytDsqkQ and told them in no uncertain terms to GTFO but leave the whiskey.
Once I got rid of the party in my head, I realized I wasn’t actually scared of my editors and agent or readers (much). Mostly, I was scared of the damn story. And that’s the thing that should scare writers. Our own stories should dig their claws in and terrify us witless. They should also thrill us and please us and piss us off and we should get to sigh every so often and think, Damn. That’s a good scene.
Emissary is a big book. It’s a journey story, not only in distance but a journey of memory and emotion, too. It’s got fights, love, honor, and truth. Immense gains and losses. I needed to write some fearless drama. I had to write big.
Thanks to all the other stuff I learned, I did.
I think.
I hope.
At this point it’s not on me to say, because it’s not just my book anymore; it belongs to the world now. So let’s party it up—until it’s time to write the next synopsis.
Thanks, Chuck, for hosting me today, and to Chuck’s readers, for always having such interesting things to add to the conversations here.
* * *
Betsy Dornbusch is a writer and editor. Her short fiction has appeared in print and online venues such as Sinister Tales, Big Pulp, Story Portal, and Spinetingler, as well as the anthologies Tasty Little Tales and Deadly by the Dozen.
Betsy Dornbusch: Website | Twitter
Emissary: Amazon | B&N | Powells | Tattered Cover
A rising star in the weightless combat sport of zeroboxing, Carr “the Raptor” Luka dreams of winning the championship title. Recognizing his talent, the Zero Gravity Fighting Association assigns Risha, an ambitious and beautiful Martian colonist, to be his brandhelm––a personal marketing strategist. It isn’t long before she’s made Carr into a popular celebrity and stolen his heart along the way.
As his fame grows, Carr becomes an inspirational hero on Earth, a once-great planet that’s fallen into the shadow of its more prosperous colonies. But when Carr discovers a far-reaching criminal scheme, he becomes the keeper of a devastating secret. Not only will his choices place everything he cares about in jeopardy, but they may also spill the violence from the sports arena into the solar system.
* * *
The inspiration for Zeroboxer didn’t come, as you might expect, from Rocky or Ender’s Game. I’d been working as a corporate strategist at Nike for several years and scribbling on the side, and the idea came to me to write an action-packed story that captured the expectations, money, and public emotion that we invest in celebrity athletes. My brain infused the concept with two things I love—science fiction and martial arts—and the premise took shape: a young man trying to make it in the world of zero-gravity prizefighting.
Zero-gravity prizefighting.
Every once in a while, a creative idea punches your buttons so hard you lose the power to speak and drool runs slowly off your chin. When an idea strikes your writerly pleasure center with that kind of force, you damn well move it to the top of your project list. Some books come easy and some come hard, but the ideas that make you wet yourself feel easier, no matter how thorny your plot problem of the day is. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could be at your door, and you would still run to your keyboard in the morning to work.
Before writing a single word of Zeroboxer, before even outlining, I made a list of the key elements in my nascent story idea: Mars Colonization. MMA. Genetic engineering. Living in space. Then I spent six straight weeks just reading and learning. I tried not to think too hard about how it would all fit in the story; I just let it all seep into my brain.
At the time, I was querying a previous novel without success. Imagine your spouse asking you about your day, and answering, “I picked up three new rejections this morning and then I spent the rest of the day watching UFC. How about you?”
When it came time to draft though, I felt so ready. Rarely did I need to stop research this or that, or feel unsure about how something would work. Those early weeks sometimes felt unproductive, like I wasn’t really writing, but I was.
Seriously. There is a lot of information available on how we could feasibly do it. Like now. What is the hold-up?! Money and political willpower, you say? Dammit, I want my Mars landing and I want it yesterday!
(Yes, I know this is a long, potentially-contentious conversation, but I will give a nod to The Case For Mars by Robert Zubrin and Arthur C. Clarke, Mission to Mars by Buzz Aldrin, and The Mars Society http://marssociety.org)
Before Zeroboxer, I’d spent a year writing a YA fantasy. As a writer trying to break in, I followed many of the writing conventions that I thought were typically expected in YA novels. I had two alternating first person narrators, one girl and one boy. I tried to give them YA voices and teenage romances. I set it up as a trilogy, because you know, teens love trilogies.
When rejections started coming in, I said, “screw it” to all that, and just wrote Zeroboxer the way it came to me: as a standalone story, told in third person, starring an 18-year-old male protagonist who fights for a living and falls in love with an older woman.
The story felt right to me in every way. When it came time for submission, though, it ran up against several editors who praised it but said it “just wasn’t YA enough” for them. It wasn’t quite “adult” either, though. In writing what I’d wanted to write, I’d ventured into a gray zone between publishing industry boxes, and I got slapped around a bit because of it. Luckily, Zeroboxer landed with an editor and a house that loved it and supported it, but it was a lesson to me: sometimes there’s a trade-off between what you want to write and what the industry norms are. Make that trade-off carefully, but know that it’s there and you may well run into it.
Zeroboxer has been garnering nods for worldbuilding, but the truth is, at it’s heart, it’s a sports story about one athlete trying to make it while navigating difficult choices. Despite the presence of space stations, Martian colonies, and widespread genetic engineering, what makes the zeroboxing world real for me, and hopefully for readers, are the recognizable things: the loud fight announcers, the excited fans, the trash-talking opponents, the sponsor ads, the dedication and training and strict diet regimens of the athletes.
The familiar, wrapped in the new. The experience of looking through a fantastical lens and still seeing ourselves, unmistakably. That’s the power and the lure of our genre.
* * *
Fonda Lee writes science fiction and fantasy for teens and adults. Zeroboxer (from Flux/Llewellyn) is her debut novel. Fonda is a recovering corporate strategist, an avid martial artist, a fan of smart action movies, and an Eggs Benedict enthusiast. You can find Fonda at www.fondalee.com and on Twitter @fondajlee.
Fonda Lee: Website | Twitter | Tumblr
Zeroboxer: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Powells
So, yesterday I finished the first draft of a novel, and as I am wont to do on the last day of writing a book, I wrote a lot. A whole bloody helluva fuckbucket of a lot. It’s just a thing that happens as I get close to the end — I tend to write books that, ideally, move a bit like thrillers and by the time you round the bend on the last 10-15% of the book it’s like, whoosh. All the scree is kicked loose. It’s avalanche time. Rocks fall. Everybody dies.
I tend to publicly chart those potential final days of writing a novel — meaning, I talk about my progress on Twitter because basically I live on Twitter and basically I’m just a fictional digital construct of Twitter (seriously, ask my wife who is actually just an Apple Magic Trackpad if I’m real and she’ll say nothing because she’s just an Apple Magic Trackpad). I chart my word count as it escalates because it gives me an excuse to take a break from the story. It gives me motivation and momentum and it also serves as kind of a self-driven application of pressure born from the promise of telling the world: “Hey, holy shitkittens, I might finish this book today.”
At the end of the day, I wrote just shy of 10,000 words. Final tally: 9,826.
It was a big day.
I do not usually write that much in a given day.
In fact, after writing that much in a given day, my brain felt not unlike the long snarl of rotten hair you pull out of the shower drain after forgetting to clean it for about six years. It looked like the little girl crawling out of the TV in The Ring. By that point, it became a bedraggled, wretched thing. Dead and dripping. (And it’s why I went out afterwards and had margaritas and tacos with the family because that’s how I recharge my batteries. TACO FAMILY TEQUILA POWER. Woo!)
But here’s one of the responses I get when I announce this rather not-small word count.
I get people saying, “Wow, I only wrote [X] words today.”
And sometimes it’s accompanied by a kind of regret or self-deprecation (however jokey).
That variable, X, might be 100 words, or 1000, or 4,000.
But as long as it’s shy of 10k, there might arrive a sense of disappointment.
Horseshit. Stuff that disappointment.
Let’s realize something, shall we? I get to write 10,000 words in a day because I have a great deal of advantage. This advantage is not inborn — I did, in fact, work my buttpucker to get it. (Er, not literally. My buttpucker has no known skillset and no matter how much I demand it learn to complete even the simplest of tasks like chewing gum or using lightswitches, it fails to perform at every level.) It’s vital to realize, however that:
a) I’ve been working professionally as a writer for ~18 years, now.
b) I’ve been working on and off as a full-time professional writer, which means my (and my family’s) only money-making function in this world is to form the quantum entanglement between my ass molecules and my chair atoms in order to vurp words into the world and get paid for them. I do literally nothing else for money. Not even sex! I’ve tried!
c) I am now fortunate enough to have my own private SHEDQUARTERS / MYSTERY BOX / MYTH LAB, which means I have a writing shed (take a tour here!) in the woods where I can come and write and scream and drink and frolic about in whatever strange costume I have deemed appropriate on that given day. My productivity is in fact way, way up since moving into the shed. I moved into the shed at the end of December and I’ve already written two entire novels and edited two other entirely different novels.
There.
Did you feel that?
That twinge? That pinch?
When I said that last thing — “I wrote two novels since December” — you might’ve felt the same pang as when I said, “I wrote 10,000 words yesterday.” A twinge of jealousy, or panic, or disappointment in yourself.
Again, I say:
Horseshit!
Hog-hokum!
Baloneypants!
Flamingotrousers!
*shakes fist at you*
Word count matters to the professional writer because it’s the metric by which we measure the work. Freelancers often get paid per word. And most writing contracts stipulate not a number of pages or chapters or lines of dialogue or bad sexual metaphors but rather, those contracts demand a certain word count. (And different genres and age ranges will also require different word count targets.) Budgeting your word count and actually scheduling it out over a number of days can actually tell you (roughly) when you’ll start and finish writing a given book. Particularly once you really learn to start writing to spec — meaning, writing to meet the word count assigned.
Further, word count has value in that it measures actual effort. Sometimes, writing feels like an act of ditch-digging rather than art-making, and that means a single shovel-load of dirt, no matter how quality the dirt or shapely the hole dug, will not complete the job. You gotta dig a lot of dirt to dig up a ditch, so you measure the effort (the quantity) rather than the immediate result (the quality). Particularly since the quality of first draft word count can veer dizzily between:
THIS IS NOT TOO BAD
and
THIS IS A MISCARRIAGE OF LANGUAGE AND MAY BE AGAINST THE GENEVA CONVENTION.
But. But! But.
Be proud of the words you write, not the words you don’t or haven’t. If you write 100 words today, cool. If you write 1000 or 5000 or a whole 10k, fuck yeah. Jump up and high-five yourself. Yes, to be a writer, you have to write. But you also have to set realistic goals and be excited by whatever progress you make, big or small. Sure, you can push yourself — as long as you don’t break yourself (translation: check yourself, but don’t wreck yourself). Sometimes, writing is a game of inches. Sometimes it’s a act of great, clumsy leaps. You gotta take pride in the small steps as much as in the big jumps. (Bonus: my 350-words-a-day no-fuckery writing plan.)
Always remember:
Word count is not the most important or the most interesting thing about your story.
Writers tell stories, not word counts.
*drops mic*
*mic lands on a sleeping squirrel*
*squirrel is angry*
* * *
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So, given all the Hugo hullabaloo this year, let’s hunker down and return to center and simply talk about awesome books by authors you dig.
This is pretty simple: drop into the comments, talk about one book you liked from the science-fiction or fantasy genres — the qualifications must be that the book had to have been released in (I know this isn’t the precise awards timeframe) the last 12 months.
Tell us what it is.
Tell us who wrote it.
Tell us why you love it so.
Forget sanctioned awards right now and just talk about the awards show that goes on and on inside your heart. (The awards show inside my heart is hosted by a Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, FYI. Unless I’m hungry, in which case it’s hosted by a sentient ham sandwich.)
In case you hadn’t heard, the Hugo Award nomination slate was co-opted by a slate of so-called Sad Puppies, a group of authors and fans who claim to want to bring the award back to its populist center and away from its literary leanings by drawing attention to popular authors who do not usually get award-attention. You might argue that the group’s true aim is revealed in its usage of such acronyms as SJW, CHORF, and SMOF.
(You will find the slate here.)
I will turn you toward the posts of some smart people.
Sarah Chorn writes in her post, “Hugo Awards 2015: A Lamentation:”
“I think the saddest thing is that, now, the Hugos really aren’t about art anymore. They are about agendas. Regardless of whether or not you believe that the awards were broken before, they absolutely are now, and everyone on this year’s shortlist will undoubtedly feel that keenly.”
And Elizabeth Bear writes in her post about the anarchy and resilience of fandom:
“…SF Fandom is a functioning, self-sustaining, multi-generational anarchy. …This is not the first time All Fandom Has Been Plunged Into War. It will not be the last. But it’s also not going to break fandom.”
And me old hearty, Editor Lee Harris, says in his post:
“But the system is broken. It’s always been open to abuse, of course. But this year the abusers came out in force and coordinated their abuse.”
I have thoughts.
These thoughts are in no meaningful order.
But I give them out anyway because this is a blog and that’s what I do. I overturn my dung-wagon of opinions upon your head and you can choose to be disgusted or roll around in the sweet ordure.
* * *
It is important, first and foremost, to realize that awards are like the tallest building in a city.
It is said that you can tell a lot about a town or a city by what it places as its tallest building — a church steeple, a bank building, an embassy, a mega brothel where its citadel is shaped not unlike a saucy dong. This is probably true, to a point. A city of finance will have a bank building at its center. An old town in Europe might have a cathedral peering above all other structures. Eventually Las Vegas will just have a giant robotic cowboy stripper vomiting fake money and pornography pamphlets onto all who stand beneath its regurgitation.
But it’s also not a perfect representation. It suggests a glimpse at the dominant culture, but also misses so much about what really goes on and who really lives there.
Awards are like this, in a sense.
You can tell something about a segment of pop culture — maybe even quite a lot — by the nominees and winners of an award slate presented in that segment. Some like to pretend that the Oscars are utterly irrelevant, but that’s patently not true. It’s also not true that they’re a shiningly complete illustration of things, either. They demonstrate film culture, though they do so imperfectly. You could, looking back through time, make a not terrible judgment about the movies of the year by the Oscar slate, but it would also be staring through a narrow arrow-slit. You would get a sense of it, but you’d also miss a great deal — the fringe independents, the big moneymaker films, and certainly films from more diverse corners.
You can tell a lot by that part of the animal, but it’s still not the whole animal.
The Hugos are like this, in a sense. They’re the trunk of the elephant — a notable, memorable, perhaps most-talked-about part of the beast, but certainly not the entirety of the creature, either.
This year, the elephant’s trunk has been rooting around in its own shit.
And it’s just covered with the stuff.
The Sad Puppies slate (and “Rabid Puppies” slate, which is the shittier, angrier version) taking over isn’t precisely against the rules. It’s legit. You can suggest that they gamed it, but to do so you summarily have to recognize that this means they still played by the rules of that game. It’s like min-maxing in D&D — you found ways to maximize your character traits for the utmost benefit to your character sheet. Though, most RPGers know that min-maxing players are often the assholes of the table, and that’s pretty much true here, too.
See, while it’s not against the rules, it’s still super-crappy. It’s crappy because it’s not about which books are the best or which books have challenged us or not even which books have sold well but rather, it’s about which books are conservative enough, which books would most rile up the “social justice warriors,” which books run counter to the diversity that has been blooming in the field of SFF recently — and whose flowers popped brightly during last year’s Hugos. (And yes, you could argue that’s a part of a whole other “agenda,” but there, not an organized one, not one driven by any slate or rah-rah movement but rather, I’d suggest, simply as a demonstration of the way SFF is moving — toward a more inclusive, wider array of voices.)
It’s slathered in extra crap-sauce because, of course, this has the explicit fingerprints of GamerGate pressed into its clay — those charm-school rejects whose claim that it was all about “ethics in game journalism” has become a hilarious refrain, a joke meme with sinister permutations (because of course it was really about harassing women and being generally fucking awful). And here, just as the Sad Puppies claim it’s about one thing, it’s really about another.
What does all of this say about SFF and the state of SFF fandom?
About SFF, it says both quite a lot and nothing at all.
Science fiction and fantasy will continue on, unaffected by this strange shadow that has been seen on its X-Ray — fandom will see the shadow and panic for a while, as it should, though time and effort will either excise the cancer or reveal it to be benign tumor rather than the malevolent, malignant one we believe it to be. The Hugos of any year neither make nor break SFF in whole, nor will it subvert, co-opt, or diminish fandom in any meaningful way.
But the Hugos are still the Hugos, and like other awards they are neither utterly demonstrative or entirely irrelevant. They say something, after all, and as the saying that I just made up goes, that something ain’t nothin‘. And I suspect what the 2015 Hugos will say when we look back is that this is, like GamerGate, a perfect picture of dinosaurs losing their collective dinosaur shit and waving their tiny ineffective arms at the coming meteors (and subsequent mammal survival party). We are undergoing a social sea change right now — as we see marginalized people gain power and voice, we also see pushback by those who feel they are losing their power. This, I suspect — I hope! — is just that. (And in fact it serves as a pretty clear, if irritating, response to the Hugo Awards last year.) If I may quote author Alyssa Wong here:
“Those crying out against diversity in SFF are howling into the void, and ultimately, they will be soundlessly swallowed up and forgotten.”
(Some might say that it is silly to call them ineffective because clearly, given this slate, they’re very effective. I’d argue that being effective would mean actually winning the awards and actually changing trends in SFF and fandom for the future. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t see that happening anymore than an overturned tractor trailer spilling pigshit won’t change the highway or the traffic pattern for more than a given day. A short-term effect is not a long-term change.)
Though, looking back, as io9 noted, this may also be the year the Hugos became explicitly political. A two-party system of agenda-driven slates bumping heads against one another.
What can you do?
Well, I dunno.
The easy answer is, “Buy a supporting membership and get voting,” but sometimes this is formed as criticism and it’s worth noting that plenty of folks (fans, authors, whoever) may not be comfortable to (or able to) spend forty bucks just to vote on a science-fiction award. Forty bucks is cheap to a lot of people. And expensive to a lot of others. There’s an argument to be made, too, that if SFF is to represent marginalized or under-served voices, then we may also want to recognize that those voices are often in possession of less filthy lucre than more privileged segments. And further, this argument somewhat explicitly turns the Hugo Awards into a capitalist pissing match rather than a popular vote — have your voice be heard and your vote counted is lovely to say as long as you don’t add to it, but it’ll cost you forty bucks, so write a fucking check.
Certainly this year’s slate is not purely a mouthful of snake venom — there are good people there and good books. Some of those people were on the Sad Puppies slat, though I’m sure those folks have found their celebration dampened a bit. Will there be a hollow pit in their stomach, a question forever asking, did I win because my book is good or did I win because of the concerted efforts of a gathered flock of noisy shit-birds? That would be a grave shame. And again, something that must be laid at the feet of these so-called Sad Puppies: they’re not fans, they’re activists. And they’re pissing all over this thing, and that urine smell is going to be very hard to get out.
Whatever happens, SFF and SFF fandom will continue on. It will be undamaged, though the dust from this will not settle quickly and will gather in all the grooves and low places for a time.
My best suggestion to you is:
Keep on keeping on. Buy great books. Advocate for great authors and for readers. Review them. Champion them. Not because of some agenda, not because of some political slate, and certainly not to take something away from anybody, but rather because you love books and the books that speak to your heart are books you should talk about. Loudly and frequently and with lots of wild gesticulations and yawps of great feeling.
The Hugos are not SFF. You are SFF. All of us! All of us.
This year, the tallest building in the city square is a crooked, broken, ugly thing.
But don’t worry — we’re tearing that one down and building something much cooler.
And on it we will tag a sign in colorful graffiti:
Keep calm and don’t worry about the dinosaurs.
