Category: writing

When I attended the SFWA Writing Date with Valerie Valdes, rather than having participants introduce themselves, we played a game of “never ever” where she provided prompts and asked us to respond in chat with whether we had ever done that kind of writing. I played along: short fiction, yes. Horror, no. But then she asked about fan fiction. I said, “No” at first. But then I started thinking. And I realized there *is* a kind of fan fiction I like to write: I like to write fan fiction of my own stories and characters.

My first work, Revin’s Heart, has been serialized by Water Dragon Publishing and is being released as seven novelettes. But while I was writing the second one, I realized there was a story that would be fun to tell, but I couldn’t be part of the series because the protagonist wasn’t there, so the story would need to be told from a different point of view. Then, as I was writing the third one, I had another story emerge.

“It’s Curtains!” Will said. 

“What?” Grip said, looking back and forth between the two of them.

“Curtains! That’s what they called him back when…” Will said, then broke off when he caught the Baron’s expression. “I’ll… I’ll tell you sometime later.

—from Storm Clouds Gather

After I finished writing the series, I decided to write these side stories and they were a blast. Especially Curtains Rise which really needed to be told in first person. And after that I *still* didn’t want to quit inhabiting these characters, so I wrote one more that was perhaps the trickiest of all.

I decided to tell the origin story for Revin. In the series, we meet him already trans. But it was clear that there must be a story there and I set out to tell it. It was both challenging and very satisfying and provided me with a variety of new insights about the character. (And a bunch of new characters whom I truly love.)

And after all that, I still didn’t want to stop, so I’ve been telling another story using VSS tweets, one tweet at a time.

Then I did finally switch and I wrote a novel about complete different characters in a complete different setting. But, no sooner had I finished the book, but there was another side story I wanted to write that, once again, couldn’t be told from the point of view of the protagonist.

So it turns out that I love fan faction: I just only write it about my own stories.

One year ago, I attended Readercon 31 and met Water Dragon Publishing. What a year it’s been. In my Year in Writing 2021, I wrote about my early experiences with Water Dragon. But when I wrote that in December, I still only had the single publication: The Third Time’s the Charm.

Since then, in consultation with the managing editor, I was able to persuade Water Dragon to serialize 6 following novelettes that extend Charm totaling about 70,000 words that we have called “Revin’s Heart“. So far two of the novelettes, For the Favor of a Lady and Storm Clouds Gather, have been released — and the manuscript for Crossing the Streams has been submitted. The rest are written and will continue to come out over the rest of this year and the first half of next year. Eventually, I anticipate that we’ll collect them together in a fix-up novel. I have also written three “side stories” about characters from the universe that we can include in the novel.

I am fully cognizant that relatively few authors (and vanishingly few new authors) have the opportunity to be serialized. And I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity to tell the story my way. I had a variety of reasons for wanting to do this. Partly, I found the 10,000 word novelette was a comfortable unit for telling these stories. Partly, I think I’ve also been influenced by reading manga and “light novels” that are often serialized in Japanese media that are more episodic in nature than a lot of American storytelling seems to be. But partly, I also saw an opportunity to engage with the public over the course of a whole year rather than publishing a book in a single event. But Revin’s Heart hasn’t been my only work.

On Tuesday, August 16, Better Angels, my first story set on the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy will be released. It was fascinating to try writing for a common setting developed by a group of authors. In November, Something Else To Do, will be released in Modern Magic, an anthology by Knight Writing Press. And I have another story, Imaginary Friends, appearing in The Future’s So Bright anthology. And several other projects in the works, including a new novel “A Familiar Problem“. It’s been quite a year.

And I’m not just writing. I’ve also joined a local writing community, the Straw Dog Writer’s Guild, serving on the Program Committee. I’m serving as a guest interviewer for the Small Publishing in a Big Universe podcast. I’m even offering some technical support for Water Dragon.

Capping my experience, during the first week in September, I’m appearing as a participant in Chicon8, this year’s WorldCon — the world’s premiere science fiction convention — in 8 separate events. I’m moderating three panels, participating in two more, offering a “table talk”, reading with other Truck Stop authors, and helping to offer a workshop. What was I thinking? It’s going to be super exciting to meet with other authors and engage with readers.

As soon as I return — literally the next day — I will need to hang up my author hat for a while and focus on my “day job” for the fall semester. But I’m excited to see what will happen next.

Today, when I awoke this morning, I found my editor had returned the edits for Storm Clouds Gather (Part Three of Revin’s Heart, serialized by Water Dragon Publishing). While I was still in bed, I downloaded the PDF on my phone and looked over all the recommended changes.

A lot of people complain about editing and editors, but I love it. Here’s someone’s who’s actually taken the the time to really read and understand my story! And they want to make it better! What’s not to love about that?

In looking over this set of suggestions, the only consistent grammatical mistake I appeared to still make is this one.

It was funny to me because a beta reader had pointed out that I do this just a couple of days ago.

I went through the manuscript and proposed revisions three times. The first time, I simply accepted the inline edits he’d proposed. These were mostly like the commas I mention above. And other minor word order changes or simplifications. The second time, I went through the comments where he had asked questions or identified places where things were unclear or didn’t read cleanly. And finally, I read it one more time to look for places where the track changes had left cruft: there was a “,.” in one place. And two spaces in another.

In one place, my editor commented that a sentence of exposition was unnecessary because the characters would know that information. At first, I misread the comment as that readers would already know and I was like, “Wut? I made that up for this book. Did they already read this book or something?”

In the end, here’s my main observation.

And, luckily, I do love reading my own writing.

I attended the 2022 Lambda Literary award ceremony. I had a lovely time and felt very welcome. I met a bunch of new people and reconnected with a few I’d met before. I was kind of surprised how little overlap there was with Flights of Foundry — I saw a handful of people I recognized, but fewer than I had expected.

The meeting was conducted online and used Airmeet as the platform but had a couple of things I hadn’t seen before. First, it led participants to fill out their profile. Only about 30% of participants did, but this was still significantly higher than at a bunch of online events where it seems everyone is functionally anonymous. Second, they were using an informal discussion tool where everyone was distributed across the screen and could double-click near them to open up a voice/video chat window with them and everyone else in the vicinity. Only a small percentage of the participants came to use the environment, but I thought it actually worked pretty well. I had nice discussions three or four times with people and would have been happy to spend more time meeting and chatting.

The actual awards ceremony was preceded by several hours of panel discussions. They were interesting and useful.

Queer New Worlds was about queer voices in speculative fiction. It was interesting to hear a variety of perspectives. I asked a question that seemed to puzzle the panelists: how to write to bridge queer and straight audiences? The answer that they seemed to like best was that you should write what you want and let the audience find it.

Banned Book List was a gallop through the books currently being banned for queer content. I asked how to get your book banned and got a very nice tongue-in-cheek answer that matched the cheekiness of my question.

LoveWins was about queer sex and erotica. It was a fun romp with lots of interesting discussion.

My take, as a newcomer to this community, is that many queer writers see their work as fundamentally disjunct from writing for straight audiences. It may, in part, due to the uniquely poisoned atmosphere in the public square today, which is being driven by the right-wing mania to torment people that their evangelical minority base hates and wants to see punished. My personal take, is that the majority of people in the country have already accepted the normalization of queer and trans content. I am hopeful that the right wing will find some other whipping boy soon and this particular phase will only last as long as the so-called “War on Christmas.” With their capture of the Supreme Court, they can certainly cause mischief, but I’m hopeful it won’t persist.

That said, I think it’s important that everyone stand up and make clear that they support our queer folk who just want to live without being threatened and harassed by right-wing assholes.

My own writing does try to bridge queer and straight audiences. I would like queer audiences to find characters that they can identify with, like the trans protagonist, Revin. Or his gay mentor Will. Or his bisexual mentors Grip and Curtains. At the same time, my goal for straight readers is that they discover they can also identify with Revin and perhaps even forget that he’s trans from time to time — only to “wake up” when events happen that throw his gender into relief, whether a casually gendered statement (e.g. “Boys like you are always hungry” or “Your penmanship is almost as good as a girl’s”) or in places where gender is enforced, like in a bath.

I don’t know how else to say it: I love my writing. I love everything about it. The process, the results, and all of it.

I love the initial forays I make into a story, writing some of the candy bar scenes that motivate me to tell a story. And the opening scene. And I love plotting the rest of the story. I love when I write the ending. And when I fill in the rest in between.

I love editing the story. Reading it over and over again, finding gaps and inconsistencies in the story. Or discovering a small change that really heightens the drama. Or the clever turn of phrase that captures the humor of the moment. Or the subtle change in word choice or order that makes it read more smoothly.

I love just reading my own stories. I love them. I lurve them!

And when other people read them. And comment on them. And when they’re surprised. And when they see the thing I was trying to do.

And, of course, I really love to sell a story.

I really, really love that. And I love all of the parts of that too: Getting the initial acceptance. Seeing what the editor finds to suggest. Seeing the work actually come out in print. Adding another line to my CV.

I love it all.

But I really can’t say I write because I love it. It’s more like a compulsion.

I haven’t always loved writing. I was a terrible writer as an undergraduate. As a doctoral student, I improved a lot. But my fiction was still execrable. It’s only recently, in my late 50s, that I feel like I’m hitting what I’m aiming at.

I can see that a lot of writers really struggle with liking their own writing. And I’ve certainly known perfectionists who could never make their own work perfect enough to satisfy themselves. I may be just arrogant and overconfident, but I don’t have that problem.

I was chatting with my publisher, talking about organizing writing events, and I had an idea. I said, “Maybe I should do a twitch stream of me writing!” I was totally joking, imagining people watching me stare at a computer screen with a look of focused concentration. (Or, you know, look at Twitter.) But he said, “It might actually be fun to do something like this for everyone one afternoon. ‘Watch our Authors at Work.'”

I thought a little more and said, “Maybe we could make up a stream that has cameras watching the authors like Hollywood Squares with word counts visible while we do sprints.”

At first, I speculated that it might be complicated enough to do this that I should look for a student or someone to do it but, upon reflection, it proved to be relatively simple to set up. Maybe there are easier ways, but here’s how I did it:

First, it assumes the writing will be in a text file called “obs_sprint.txt” in your home directory. To write the file, I use atom.io with the autosave-onchange plugin turned on. But other editors would be possible.

To do the word counts, I wrote a bash script: “obswc.sh”

#! /bin/bash
while [ : ]
do
	echo Words: `cat ~/obs_sprint.txt | wc -w` | tee ~/obs_word_count.txt
	sleep 30
done

Every 30 seconds, this script outputs the word count to the shell (so you can see it) and saves it to a second text file called “obs_word_count.txt”. The script runs until you kill it with control-C. (Note, we could easily change the delay if 30 seconds isn’t frequent enough.)

Next, I configured OBS Studio to have a Text “source” reading from the word count text file. Then I made the text big (200pt) and placed it up a bit from the bottom (so it won’t be covered by the Zoom controls). Finally, I used “Start Virtual Camera” and selected the virtual camera in Zoom. (Note that in Zoom, the preview it shows you of yourself is flipped horizontally, but other people will see the correct view).

Now I can start the script, empty out the obs_sprint.txt text file, and start writing. Every 30 seconds, my word count will be updated on screen.

Now if we can just get John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig to go head-to-head!

A couple of months ago, I volunteered to read submissions (aka “slush”) for Water Dragon Publishing when I had some time. After picking his jaw up off the floor, the editor welcomed my offer and said he would send me some manuscripts when I was ready. With the beginning of spring break, I finally had time and was provided with 16 manuscripts to start with. It’s been a fascinating experience for me.

When my brother Philip Brewer attended Clarion, he mentioned that he’d been expecting that getting his own manuscripts critiqued was what would be the most useful thing. But it turned out that critiquing other manuscripts and seeing what other people made of them was actually more useful. Reflecting on the experience he wrote a blog post about how to critique a manuscript. In my case, I was writing something far short of a full critique, but I found these principles helpful to structure my thinking.

I’ve come to realize that most of what is published in science fiction falls into a rather narrow slice of what gets written. And so studying what’s been published is not particularly useful for learning. What gets submitted, however, is a much richer source of data for learning to recognize problems. It’s hard to look at my own writing and recognize problems with exposition or pacing. But the slush pile has a lot of manuscripts where these problems are manifest. It’s been really helpful for giving me a better sense for how to recognize and address these problems with my own writing.

I’ve finished a first slug of manuscripts and requested another set to look at before spring break is over. It’s not something I’m going to want to do forever, but it’s been a fascinating adventure. What I really should do is join a writing group. But I haven’t found one yet where I feel comfortable. I’ll keep looking.

Neil Clarke spoke at length during a kaffeklatsch at Boskone about editing and publishing. Having submitted a half-dozen manuscripts to Clarkeworld, with none of them selected, I was interested to have more insight into what he’s looking for. But he just said, “Surprise me.” He then went to go on to about thematic things he doesn’t like or wouldn’t like. He talked about how the statistics of what he’s accepted historically are misleading, because they don’t really predicted what the next thing is. Although he uses them to try to maintain balance, for example, in terms of accepting manuscripts from international authors. In other countries, the markets for short fiction are limited or absent — or are actually overwhelmed by work translated from American sources. Some local authors can benefit from the “pedestal effect” of having their work appear in the US market and then get translated for distribution back home.

He spoke at some length about the state of the small press. He argues that most short fiction outlets are functionally small press (with a few notable exceptions like Tor.com). Many struggled during the pandemic, but things seem to be normalizing. The biggest problem is not quality or supply, but in getting people to pay for what they consume. (Only about 7% of readers pay for what they read.) The lack of funds means that a lot of the labor involved (e.g. editing) is unpaid, which makes these outlets vulnerable to illness or burnout. We need to find some way to make the finances work better.

Someone asked about using a paywall to let people see some amount for free. But he said that model, which might work for news, wasn’t satisfactory for fiction. Authors want their stuff to be out where people can see it — especially for the fan-nominated awards. If people can’t read your stuff, they can’t nominate it. And, in fact, there was evidence to suggest that stories that were in anthologies — or paywalled — were at higher risk for not being nominated for fan-based awards.

I asked about alternate financing models, e.g. Patreon and Kickstarter. He said he thought they were OK and, in fact, he uses Patreon his own self. But had concerns about using Kickstarter, which he said was like a “sword of Damocles” hanging over your head. It might be OK for seed money to start something, but subscriptions are more predictable: you may have some lapses and some new ones every year, but more likely to be incremental in terms of changes.

A key problem with small presses is that, since it doesn’t really pay for itself, it often depends on free labor. He indicated he had declined to pay himself for his editorial work for years, to “re-invest” the revenues back into the press. After some personal reverses, he decided he wanted to quit his day job to focus on the press full-time, and that it took 5 years, but that he had accomplished that. (Although, he admitted, his wife still had a day job).

In the end, he said he enjoyed working with short fiction: its where experimentation happens, so its constantly changing and evolving — it’s what drives the field. The money quote:

“It’s not negative to notice the problems [in publishing]: it’s negative to do nothing about them.” —Neil Clarke

I had originally planned to attend Boskone face-to-face, but when Omicron caused Arisia to cancel, I decided to wait to see how conditions were before deciding about Boskone. In the end, I decided to attend only virtually. These notes are pretty scattered but I wanted to get down my recollections as best as I could.

There was very little information about what the “virtual” conference would entail. A day or two before the convention, a discord server was made available and the schedule showed which panels would be streamed virtually — usually just one or two per session.

Boskone started on Friday afternoon, but I was still teaching. So I missed the first several sessions and could only start attending Friday evening.

The first session I attended, about “unhappy endings” was interesting to me. Having written a story that is a tragedy (A Bitter Lesson), I was interested to hear what the panelists had to say.

As that was winding down, I noticed that Ada Palmer was holding forth in one of the voice channels of the Discord. So I hung with them for a while before heading to bed kinda early — it had been a very long week.

On Saturday, I came to my computer early and started streaming programming from Boskone, though I mostly left it running in the background while I worked on other stuff. I listened to the panel on Island Fiction — this topic resonates with me having visited St. Croix — and having set my current serial Revin’s Heart in an archipelago of islands. I tried to listen to the presentation about Quantum Computing but I found I wasn’t getting anything out of it to just have it in the background. The Craft of Writing Conversation with Max Gladstone and Ada Palmer was enjoyable. And it’s always fun to hear readings by Charlie Stross & Cory Doctorow. The panel “Writing the Naughty Bits” was fun. I was pleased to learn about Circlet Press.

I got up early on Sunday morning for Do it Again: The Pains (and Pleasures?) of Rewriting. The money quote:

“Being too stupid to know when to quit is a real asset in this business.” —@TamoraPierce

Unfortunately, it was at the same time as the session about inclusive cons. So I switched back and forth between the two a bit.

The Ask the Editors session was interesting — it’s always useful to know what the enemy is thinking. Although that was one of their key points: the editor is not the enemy. But that’s just what they’d want you to think, isn’t it? The money quote:

“It’s frustrating because sometimes editors can be RIGHT!” —David Marshall

The panel on Social Media had Cory Doctorow and had some interesting stuff. I’ve been watching social media for a long time, so it was interesting to hear where things may be going. I enjoyed the panel about Scientists Who Write Science Fiction mainly for getting to see Larry Niven, who wrote so much amazing stuff I remember from my youth. The panel Monstrous Façade: Disability and Disfigurement as a Villainous Trope had the amazing John Wiswell who said, roughly, whether you have an artificial leg or a tattoo, the moral equivalence of your body modifications are equal.

Finally, I had fun with Impossible Cities in Speculative Fiction. There was a bit about the evil side in Star Wars. I agreed with the guy who said that the original Star Wars movie (not IV, but the original) was the only good Star Wars movie. To be honest, the only bit I really paid serious attention to was a kaffeeklatsch with Neil Clarke, for which I took detailed notes. I’ll post that in a separate blog post

from Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo

So, why do I write about the trans experience and trans characters? Because I’m moved by their struggle. And because I’m ashamed that I cowered for years being afraid to stand up for what I knew was right — either for myself or for others.

When I first heard of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism, I wasn’t sure what to think. The TERFs claim to speak for women who want to exclude trans women from their spaces. And, at first, I thought, “Well. I’m a man: what right do I have to enter into a conversation about women’s spaces?” But then I realized something else: Who am I to determine whether or not someone is a woman? If someone tells me they’re a woman, I’m going to take to take their word for it. The alternative can only produce harassment of people who don’t look a certain way. Or sound a certain way. Or act a certain way. Policing people in this way is evil and cannot possibly lead to any good outcomes. It should rejected in all its forms.

In The Third Time’s the Charm, Revin realizes that he’s a man in a woman’s body:

“You know you asked before if I was a woman pretending to be a man or a man in a woman’s body?” Revin whispered.
“Yeah?” Will said.
“I think I know the answer now.”
“Good for you, lad. Be true to yourself!”

The Third Time’s the Charm.

I encourage everyone to be honest with themselves. And I exhort everyone to encourage those around them to also be at peace with themselves. Let’s support each other.

In the end, I’m reminded of a presentation by Ibram X. Kendi about racism. He has so eloquently argued that the axis of racism is not between racist and not-racist. It must between racist and anti-racist. In the same way, it’s not enough to merely accept —and not oppose — transgender people. We must acknowledge their humanity and support them in choosing to be true to themselves. I don’t think anyone “chooses” to be trans because it’s easy — because it is manifestly not easy. Choosing to transition is choosing to finally be honest with yourself. I embrace my trans friends and colleagues and will do my utmost to ensure that our culture recognizes and welcomes them for what they are: fully-fledged members of our society deserving of the same rights and privileges as anyone else.

Read Part I and Part II.