Reading, Writing, & Approximation

A Few Irrelevant Rejections

2010-06-21T23:18:00.003-04:00

After months of not bothering, I went through the rejection letters for Bitter Cold. There were four of them, and they had no impact. Reviewing my work on that particular novel, I was quite disappointed. If someone had replied positively, I would have been quite confused, because I definitely wouldn't have accepted something in that condition.

Hopefully, some heavy revision will be able to work it into something a little more worthwhile. Of course, that's after I get to a better place on my current projects, which hopefully won't be too distant a time.

Debts

2010-06-19T17:53:00.001-04:00

In theory, I just made the final payment on one of my college loans. Were it the larger of the two, this would likely feel rather liberating, but it was much the smaller.

Still, forty bucks a month. Woo!

Disappointment

2010-03-26T19:10:00.004-04:00

I started reading Unraveling, the first time I've read it since I finished my revisions a year ago, and I'm not very happy with it. I disagree with everyone who said it was ready for prime-time. Were I an agent receiving this, I would reject it.

The problems are numerous:

Info-dumps are polluting the landscape
Excess words leave many sentences bloated
Paragraphs are in desperate need of splitting
Character introductions are too heavy-handed
The voice is not sufficiently engaging

Problems 2 & 3 require fairly basic revisions to be solved. Problem 5 requires a re-write with minimal changes. Problems 1 & 4 are where the serious issues arise.

The poor character introductions are essentially the same as info-dumps: the book is just throwing a lot of information at the reader, rather than letting things be discovered in an organic manner. There are several possible solutions to this:

Remove elements of the world, so there is less information to dump
Lengthen the novel, extending the first section
Start the story one book earlier

Solution 1 would require a re-write of the entire book. The story could remain essentially unchanged, but facts that differ from standard reality could be cut. The main problem here is that the events take place completely isolated from the world at large and after a great deal of major events. Adding a world-at-large would remove some of the awkward info-dumps, but would still require a lot of extraneous information. Trimming back the preceding events or weaving them in later would leave Ayla's initial situation feeling implausible.

Solution 2 would be the easiest to do, but also has the largest problem: the introduction is already bordering on being too slow, so any stretching of it could be problematic, and the novel as a whole is already fairly long. I'd need to re-read it in its entirety (I'm still quite early on) to decide if starting a little earlier in the chain of events would make the overall pacing palatable.

Solution 3 seems to have no major flaws. The cause of the info-dumps is that many important events have already happened, so there's plenty of story-line to work with, and then the overall story I have planned would come out as a trilogy, which is standard for a reason. There's the unfortunate side-effect that I would have to re-write a majority of Unraveling, but that's easier done than said.

All told, I'm leaning towards solution #3, but certainly haven't decided yet.

Some Finalization

2010-03-14T18:03:00.003-04:00

I finished a (hopefully) final revision of Bitter Cold. Once I have a printed copy to read, I'll not do so for several months. These last few weeks of revision have been very exhausting and I don't want to touch this book for a long while.

I think that I'll read Unraveling and start writing its sequel, soon.

Rather Direct

2010-02-23T09:31:00.002-05:00

I just received a rejection from Valeria Smith, Literary Agent, which should always be said like it's coming from a super-spy. It was short and direct and had a scanned-and-reprinted signature, which really isn't a signature.

I suppose it's proper to do that, giving a personal touch or some-such. I can't really argue. It didn't add anything, but it didn't detract, either. There's probably someone out there who prefers a reprinted signature to nothing-at-all.

2.5 Months

2010-02-11T11:57:00.002-05:00

So, I basically stopped any form of communication for two-and-a-half months. It might seem like I just stopped writing on my blog, but it's quite a bit more than that. I've only checked my email about five times, and I've checked my mail even less than that.

It is my assumption, based on what I've seen from others, that this is not normal behavior, but I find it quite relaxing from time to time.

And, during this incommunicado period, I finished writing Bitter Cold. I've still got to give it one more look over before I start sending it out, but I'm feeling good about this version. I only had to delete two characters and rewrite the entire second half of the book three times, and it's feeling fairly complete.

Yay!

Just the Right Phrase

2009-11-21T06:03:00.002-05:00

While most of the agents that have replied haven't quite hit the note that would make the rejection gentle, Spectrum Literary Agency just managed. The reply is short and to the point, clearly just mass-printed, not personalized, but it does include the phrases, "I was not sufficiently enthusiastic to feel I'd be the right agent for your work," and "I'm taking on very few new clients so I must turn down a lot of good submissions."

Yes, I know it says that no matter how terrible my submission may have been; it's just a generic rejection notice. That doesn't change the fact that those sentences convey the idea that my submission might have been plenty good, just not the right thing on the right desk at the right time.

Nothing Says Personal Like a Big Black Stamp

2009-11-21T05:56:00.003-05:00

Sternig & Byrne Literary Agency gave a rejection to Unraveling, and with impressive style. There is no reply letter, gently declining. Instead, the entire query letter was sent back, just stamped with big black letters that read, "I'm afraid your material doesn't suit our current needs and/or interests."

Don't worry, though, they made sure to add a personal touch. Beneath the stamp was a hand-written "Sorry" followed by what may have been someone's initials.

Genius!

That was quick...

2009-11-08T09:56:00.003-05:00

I sent Unraveling out to another round of agents on Thursday. Of course, I then ignored it and didn't worry at all, withdrawing from the world as I so often do. This now is the first time that I have checked my email since then, and it seems that I received a rejection from one of the emailed queries.

Thinking, "Wow, that was quick," I checked when I received that email. Same day, 4 hours after sending out the query. Their website lists Jodi Meadows as "Assistant and Slush Wrangler" and claims that she loves reading queries. They weren't kidding.

So, The Rappaport Agency is now in the list of rejections, again without a physical letter to pointlessly preserve.

Partial Success

2009-11-04T09:30:00.003-05:00

In this, my latest revision of Bitter Cold, I felt that I would be able to revise the story, even with massive changes to many of the key events, without needing to rewrite the entirety of the novel. In some ways I have succeeded, in some ways I have failed.

I am not needing to rewrite any plot events that I had not initially intended to change. There have been no ripple effects so severe as that. Unfortunately, I am still needing to rewrite basically everything to correct much smaller problems.

Bitter Cold is written from a very restricted perspective and in a very specific narrative voice, both that of the main character, Meriwa. The changes made early on caused few major problems, but a great many minor ones. When a tiny element of Meriwa's knowledge changes, it needs to be corrected countless times throughout. For example, there's a man in one scene who, after revisions, she does not hear the name of. There is no way for her to catch his name without the events making no sense. In the previous revision, he was a more important character and she knew his name. Now, every off-hand reference to him needs to be fixed.

That is just one example of quite a few that have been coming up, and the end result is that I can rarely go through a paragraph without running into some inconsistency that needs to be fixed. In some ways, needing to completely rewrite a section would be more acceptable, because it wouldn't be so boring.

Soldiering On

2009-11-02T13:19:00.002-05:00

I'm making slow but steady progress on Bitter Cold, still. I'm to the second portion that is troubling, but this bit is less troubling that the previous was, so I have high hopes.

More importantly, I need to get back to submitting my finished novel, Unraveling. I still haven't gotten replies from two of the agents I sent it to, but it's been almost ninety days, so I think I'll try sending it to another six. Not as I've done that, yet, but I double-checked the guidelines and whether or not they were still accepting queries.

For the moment, back to cat vacuuming.

Blue Diablo

2009-10-20T05:51:00.002-04:00

2 of 7: Not truly terrible, but not for lack of trying
Author: Ann Aguirre

There were a lot of good elements here, but they weren't the majority. The main character's relationships--this was largely a romance, so they matter--were simply not acceptable. I can believe that such relationships might exist. They are plausible, but that is all. The love interest was neither sufficiently likable or despicable as to give me a desire for any particular outcome. In short, I just didn't care how it ended.

However, that was the least of the problems. The largest problem was that the other elements, the mystery and action around which the other major plot threads revolved, were all stupid. Everything was set in motion because there was an intentionally-laid trail for the heroes to follow. Even though the explanation for that trail was plausible, it's still a crappy way to work a plot.

Then there was the action, which made no sense. No need for details, but: grenades don't work like that, people don't act like that, and security around drug lords isn't that useless.

The magic was actually decent, the only part of the whole story that made sense.

On a closing note, if one of the characters is The Hand of God, and he appears basically at random to save the heroine from death on multiple occasions, the novel is using deus ex machina. Deus ex machina sucks.

Mending Flaws

2009-10-20T05:46:00.003-04:00

I have made significant progress on Bitter Cold once more. I believe I have fixed a serious problem in the plot and structure of the novel. An event early on was a good sub-climax but, due to its partial resolution, undercut the import of later events and caused the motivations of the protagonist to not fully match the actions taken. I believe that by rewriting that sequence and changing some key elements, the story as a whole will be much stronger.

Which leaves me back at the same point I reached in my revision over a month ago, when I first realized how badly this section worked. I swear, if I read through the next bit and realize, for what would be the third time, that the preceding portion just doesn't jive right, I'm going to scream.

The Drowning City

2009-10-10T09:03:00.002-04:00

3 of 7: Entertaining but flawed
Author: Amanda Downum

The climax of this novel was well-thought out and presented. The progression of the story until that point gave glimpses at an interesting world and strong, intricate characters. Although none of that was truly amazing, it was definitely good. Unfortunately, the beginning worked fairly hard to undermine it.

The story starts out alright but not good. The characters are flat, uninteresting, broadly drawn. Even worse, those characters do not mesh with the strong characters that a discovered later on. Rather than giving the feeling that the initial characters grew to become the complex characters found later on, the feeling is that the narrator was simply lying at the start of the novel.

To make matters worse, early on in the novel, there are some factual elements of the world given that make the finale seem logically unsound. The feeling was, once more, that the end did not grow naturally from the facts given.

Despite all of that, the book is fine. The ending was good enough that I have high hopes for the rest of the trilogy. So long as the author from the last two-thirds keeps writing, rather than whoever put together that beginning, everything should be fine.

The Vague Beginning of a Theory of Genre

2009-10-07T14:11:00.005-04:00

I think a great deal about the nature that which I read and write, especially the concept of genre, of classifications of works. The general use of genre definitions that I see is done by noting elements of the story, especially the setting (dragons=fantasy) or the structure of the plot (unsolved murder=mystery). Although this often collects together stories of a similar style, I do not feel that it actually qualifies what makes the story function as it does.

For these reasons, I have been contemplating other ways to classify works. A rough summarization of my initial theory, written in the hopes of my better understanding my own thoughts by typing them out, proceeds from here.

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Stories are most accurately classified according to the experience of the reader. For example, a fantasy story (as defined by traditional genre concepts) might give the reader an experience of fantasization. The overlaps completely with most all of the traditional romance genre, as the reading of that is largely about fantasization.

Going from here, the large genres I come upon are¹:

Fantasization: An imaginative escape is offered to the reader

Speculation: Questions about something are raised, typically society or the future

Introspection: Self-analysis and self-reflection are provoked

Deciphering²: A complex problem, usually a mystery, is solved

The probably are quite a few more, although those are all that come to mind.

Of note for an author is that these are highly distinct from the typical genres, and give a lot of information as to what writing style should be pursued, unlike the typical genre definitions. The traditional classification of fantasy gives very little to go on. There is a traditional style, but all that is needed to fit into the genre is strange monsters or magic (or in some cases not even that). A story could qualify for the traditional fantasy definition but, stylistically, feel wildly different, as is the case with much of Gaiman's writing.

While the writing of Gaiman does offer something of an imaginative escape, it is a much lighter version of that than what I mean by the genre. Consider his stories to just be dipping their toes in the pool of fantasization. While they do offer something of an escape for the imagination, they don't actively encourage the reader to go beyond the story to new horizons.

For comparison, let me align American Gods and Spiderman. No matter which comic you read, it is clearly a story about Spiderman, and in reading that story, you are encouraged to imagine beyond what simply happens. There is the idea that Spiderman could be doing anything, going anywhere, that there are infinite other adventures to be had. If, after reading the first half of a story arc, you imagine a different ending while you wait for the rest to come out, well and good. Further, while thinking on Spiderman and other issues, it is not amiss to imagine Spiderman in other such diverse situations. Consider having just read a Spiderman comic, and the watching a special on the gangs in China. It would not be amiss to imagine Spiderman fighting crime in China. By contrast, American Gods doesn't particularly encourage you to imagine Shadow going out and falling into a struggle between the ancient gods and modern forces that rage in the orient.

These category titles are clearly in an awkward form, but I don't want to use terms that directly overlap with the traditional genre categories.

The category is inconsistent with the others which causes me no end of anguish, but I simply cannot think of another term that applies.

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Well, that's clearly not done, but I'm done writing for now, so I'm just going to post this first little bit of it.

More Resubmission

2009-10-02T10:12:00.002-04:00

Asimov's rejected my short story, "The Heights". I've sent it into Strange Horizons, now.

S.A.S.E.

2009-10-02T09:18:00.002-04:00

I have received three more rejections recently (well, one not so recently, but I apparently forgot to comment on it). Donald Maass Literary Agency sent in an email rejection some weeks ago that I apparently never noted down, FinePrint Literary Management sent a rejection letter that I got about a week back and had on a stack of to-do things beside my desk, and I just a few days ago received a rejection from Writers House, which was a truly odd rejection.

Firstly, instead of being on plain white paper, this reply from Writers House was printed on a nice off-white paper with some texture to it, with a soft brown tone for the logo and so-such. In the heart of this was something that gave a pretense of being not-a-form-letter, but actually contained no specifics that would disallow its being a form-letter. This maybe-form-letter then was actually signed, but by an assistant, not an actual agent.

Although that is a little odd, what is truly strange is that it was sent to me in an envelope of this same style of paper with their logo on it and my address hand-written on the front. Mayhaps I should appreciate this effort on their part, but honestly I am just confused as to why they didn't use the self-addressed, stamped envelope I sent along.

Writing What I Read

2009-09-23T13:58:00.002-04:00

For the past month, I've been reading almost strictly traditional fantasy, which has been something of a problem. As I read a story, my mind constantly wanders into imaginings of stories that lie all about the tale, whether they hinge on character, world, or plot. Often, these imaginings will coincide with a story I am writing, in which case my imagination will further that story. If they do not match anything I have in progress, I start to write something new.

Unfortunately, if what I am trying to write does not coincide with what I am reading, it becomes difficult to make progress. My imagination, fired by what I have read, does not slide naturally into a story that is wildly different. At the moment, what I am trying to write and revise is urban fantasy, while what I am reading is traditional fantasy, and the dissonance is painful.

Due to this, I decided to take a turn aside for a spell. I know not if what I am currently pursuing has any true purpose to it. There are many imagined endings and many imagined middles, a few of which even match up, and the beginning seems decent enough, but in all likelihood, this story will be left to rot as so many are.

However, at the moment, I am reading a story that includes horses and kings, so I am writing a story that includes horses and kings. Aside from the horses and kings, there's not much they have in common, but honestly, horses and kings are quite a lot.

Brutal Revision

2009-09-10T02:13:00.002-04:00

It's a good thing that I rewrote that last section, but it doesn't feel good. Before I improved the writing, I thought the sequence was bad because it was poorly written. It was poorly written, and that was a problem, but that wasn't the only problem. Now that the writing itself is adequate, I can see that no matter how good that portion is, it won't be good for the story.

For the past weeks, I've been trying to decide how to replace it. I haven't decided yet, but fundamental changes do need to happen. In a way I'm happy that I've found the problem so that I can fix it, but it's not an entirely nice experience to find that I screwed up a significant part of my story.

Proper revision is like that, sometimes.

Keeping At It

2009-08-19T15:47:00.002-04:00

Alright, only an hour after I got that rejection notice from F&SF and I have now resubmitted to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. I don't have much to say about that, except that the magazine's title is rather long.

As far as my state-of-mind goes, keeping the submissions going out is good. Publication is an active process, and it feels nice to consciously keep it that way.

Half-pages?

2009-08-19T14:19:00.002-04:00

The rejection letter from F&SF is a brief affair. It manages to sound more personal than distant, but is also far less informative than I've seen from some other rejection letters. Oddest of all, it's printed on a half-page. I suppose that saves paper and all, but it seems like all of that advantage would be no greater than the hassle of chopping the paper in half. I mean, it's not like it's a half-sized sheet of paper, it's a sheet that was chopped in half by one of the big slicers. One edge is off of straight and has a slight curve to it, even. And, if the goal is to save paper, switching to email would be a very effective method of doing so.

I suppose that the size of the paper shouldn't matter, but how will it stack with the other rejection notices I receive? Maybe half-sheets are the norm, or at least common enough that I could make a stack of each, although the half-sheet stack would be odd. The sheet is folded, but the fold is lengthwise, making the folded shape a bit thin to stack well, but stacking unfolded sheets with a crease never works properly.

We shall see, we shall see.

Combat is Painful

2009-08-18T23:44:00.004-04:00

327 lines of Bitter Cold are now revised for a fourth time, and I got through one of the more awkward chapters. The reason that particular chapter is awkward is that it contains combat. There are many reasons that combat sequences are hard to revise.

In non-combat sequences, the activities a person takes can be left extremely vague and can easily be given a back seat to the literary qualities of the scene. A sentence might flow better if someone toys with that pen instead of tapping their fingers, so it can just be changed. If a similar action in a combat sequence changes, it can derail the entire thread of the scene. It could, for example, cause a shift in an injury location that messes up the comments later about pain and makes many future motions in that sequence implausible. In general, a small change in a combat sequence can easily cascade into a mess of problems while revising.

Related to this problem is that, when a particular action seems necessary but doesn't mesh with the literary flow, finding the proper phrasing to include it can be very time consuming. In most portions of a story, the specific action can be modified, but changing actions in combat sequence goes back to potentially causing other problems later. Balancing between these options makes the revision process slow and awkward.

Another oddity of combat sequences is that the threshold for quality is extremely high. Minor errors tend to glare obviously, and there is much less room for suspension of disbelief. This is especially true in a fantasy setting, where reality is being largely disregarded. Combat sequences are where the separation from reality becomes most clear, so it draws into the light any flaws in the setting very swiftly.

The combination of a high threshold for quality, a tendency to have one change cause problems elsewhere, and the tension between literary phrasing and technical necessities results in fight scene revision being a bruising process.

Novels of Deverry and the Westlands

2009-08-15T15:38:00.004-04:00

4 of 7: High quality sword-and-sorcery. Fun to read.
Books: Daggerspell, Darkspell, The Bristling Wood, The Dragon Revenant
Author: Katherine Kerr

This is close to as good as sword-and-sorcery gets. In addition to having fun characters and an active story, the political, historical, and social backdrop is richly drawn and highly believable. Although there are many sword-and-sorcery novels this good, there are few that are better.

The most distinctive aspect of these novels is at once their greatest strength and greatest weakness. The main storyline, due to some peculiarities of the characters, relates to many historical events. Those events are included as full stories, amidst the main story. This direct inclusion of history serves to make the entire setting vastly more comprehensible than other novels can claim.

Including stories in this manner, however, creates an unfortunate problem. The historical sections are full stories in their own rights, usually about a hundred pages in length, rather than just quick-little-chapters. These sections are very well written and quite enjoyable to read, but still not as engaging as the main storyline. The characters of the central story are more compelling, and the events of the central story are only vaguely related to the events of the historical sections. The end result is that, although the historical sections are excellent, they feel somewhat boring because they prevent the continuation of the main storyline.

On the whole, I am greatly enjoying the books, but it is sometimes hard to read more historical segments, all the while wondering what's about to happen in an unrelated storyline.

Addendum regarding The Bristling Wood: This book is worse than the first two. The plot is forced. Having major characters suffer changed behavior due to sorcery is usually a bad idea, but that really wasn't the worst of it. The fact is, the events that formed the plot would not have happened if the characters were who they are supposed to be. The most telling example, but not the only example, is as follows: Rhodry and Jill are riding through the country to meet each other. Rhodry is tricked into going the wrong way. Jill, due to scrying, knows that Rhodry is going the wrong way. Jill has the magical means to inform Rhodry that he is going the wrong way. She does not do so. When the entire plot hinges on someone being blatantly stupid, the book is flawed.

Addendum regarding The Dragon Revenant: This is closer to the quality of the first two, only a slight bit worse. Also, the title really should be different.

A Very Long Day

2009-08-14T11:15:00.002-04:00

It happens to me on occasion that my writing focus is misaligned with my writing goals. Only a day ago, I was in an inventive and casual mood with my writing, which is to say that I could write a great deal of crap but not much of anything worth reading. Should I be writing a new story, this is a wonderful thing, because I can swiftly fill a page and lay out the framework of a story for later revision. In fact, I wrote an entire short-short story that afternoon, even though it wasn't what I meant to be working on.

My actual goal was to continue revising my most recent novel, Bitter Cold, so that it might be worth reading at some point soon. In that mood, I could not revise the novel to any useful level, or really revise it at all. When I sat down to write, I wanted to write new things, and when I looked at old things and attempted to better them, I failed.

Now, I know well that, when in such a mood, I usually remain in it until something breaks me of it, and there wasn't much of anything that I really wanted to write from scratch, so the mood needed breaking. To this end, I decided not to write for a day, hoping to jostle loose my mood from where it was wedged.

It turns out that I think about writing a lot. At least once an hour, I would stop what I was doing and wander over to my computer to write. I had to stop myself. If I actually let myself write, with my head where it was, no good would come of it. Hour after hour, I would pause to sit and think that I should be writing, then force myself to return to my long hours of leisure.

A day without writing can be a very long day, it turns out.

The Deryni Novels

2009-08-12T10:30:00.002-04:00

2 of 7: Not worth reading, but not so bad as to be feared.
Books: Deryni Rising, Deryni Checkmate, High Deryni
Author: Katherine Kurtz

I just finished reading the first three Deryni novels, and I am quite unimpressed. The characters and their actions seemed fake and unrealistic and the plot was full of unnecessary things that distracted from the story without adding anything special in return. More than anything else, it just wasn't believable.

There could be many examples, but I'll just give one: The king and his comrades are supposed to be having a magical duel to the death on the following day, the four of them against four enemies. That night, they have some talks about what is going on and exhaust themselves responding to some dangerous events that arise, even though the responses could easily be put off for several days if they were willing to do so. The next day, as the duel is concluding, it is revealed that the king does not know how to kill someone with magic. So, to be clear, the proper preparation for a duel to the death is not to learn how to kill someone with magic or to rest up so you will be awake and alert for the coming conflict.

The entire series was like that, just a step off of rational and plausible.

Public Rejection

2009-08-11T09:30:00.003-04:00

About zero minutes after posting about how nice it feels to have already sent things in I received a rejection notice from one of the agents I sent my novel to. The first thought is, of course, "damn". Then I updated the rejection count for that novel and it was a great relief. The publication of the rejection is a nice feeling as well.

Also, I'd like to thank the agent, Sara Megibow, for a prompt response. The advantages of email submissions become clear in such circumstances, but even by email a response time of only a few days is better than waiting for weeks on end.

Edit: An oddity of the emailed rejection is the lack of a rejection letter. I can of course archive the email, or I could print it off, but I cannot have a proper rejection letter to add to a stack of rejection letters, not in the same way I can a dead-tree response.

Unscratched Itches and the Publication Process

2009-08-11T08:02:00.002-04:00

I recently submitted a good deal of writing for publication. I got some help organizing a list of agents to send my novel to and a list of magazines to send short stories to, then sent a novel packet to several agents and sent three short stories to different magazines.

The hard part was writing the first cover letter and the novel synopsis. After that headache, it went pretty quick.

What I didn't expect is how it felt to have finished that. I have an scene in my mind where I would think about what I had done and worry about success and failure and all the permutations thereof. So far (admittedly only two days), that has not happened. Instead, the feeling is of a itch that no longer itches, where before submission it was an itch, still unscratched. My thoughts wander to publication and I think, "Ah, yes, I don't have any work to do on that. Is it not wonderful?"

Yes, sending things to agents and publishers is wonderful.