The Dilemming of the Middle

I'm having a nice time-out for a couple of days while waiting for the print proofs and cover for Shaky Ground. It's time to reflect.

I don't usually blog about writing (who the hell needs that), but in the course of a discussion in our critique group, Richard mentioned the quandaries of writing long versus short fiction, it got me going. Another member of the group also distracted me by mentioning hand puppets, and I laid in bed this morning trying to get the picture of Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop out of my head. I think my brain is trying to destress, but it's going about it in a very weird way.

a blue-haired dilemming

For the past two years, I've been concentrating my efforts on learning how to write long. Not 'how to write a novel' per se - to paraphrase Gaiman, you only learn to write the novel you're currently writing. But writing long has different requirements than writing short, one of which is sustaining a story for 100,000 words. Which means solving the very difficult problem, what I call, the dilemming* of 'the middle', in addition to the beginning and the end. I've put down two books lately that failed 'the middle'. Both were contemporary fantasy, fast-paced with lots of supernatural stuff. Just my kind of thing. I didn't even get halfway with either of them before the 'meh' factor kicked in. But I will pick them up again. Someday. Maybe. Maybe I just got sidetracked. Maybe not.

I have huge qualms about middles at the moment. Is it showing? Or is it just these jeans? I guess I'm mostly afraid about my own 'middle' of the upcoming book - will my readers think it 'meh' - or any book I'm writing, really.  While the beginning has to grab, titillate and propel the reader into the novel, make them care about the characters and what's going to happen to them, and the end has to satisfy by justifying every premise set up in the beginning, the middle has to weave us into, through, and around the story, keep us turning the pages, and make us think about the darn thing enough that we pick up the same book the next day (or not be able to put it down and turn off the light). While I wouldn't say beginnings and endings are easy, middles are the pancreatic cancer of most stories - it's very hard to detect what's wrong, you don't feel it while you're writing, and when you do figure it out, it's often fatal.

Writing short requires making a story complete and beautiful and perfect in less than 10,000 words. I admire people who can do that. Since I've been reading submissions for Albedo One, there's usually only one story (two at the most, on average) in a batch that I read all the way through. Middles are a huge dilemming for short stories as well, and that's where I usually get stuck. Endings are a different problem and just as huge, but we'll save that for another day.

I wouldn't say it takes more skill to write short than long. It's a different skill. Most writers seem better at one than another. Some can do both. I'd like to be one of the latter, but I'm not there yet. Not even close.

Okay, back to reading a 1700's Scottish Highland romance (no, not that one, another one). I'm just getting to the middle and still have hopes for this one despite the gushiness of the protagonist. 

What are your biggest writing dilemmings these days?

*a cross between a small mammal who throws itself off cliffs and an intractable problem.


photo credit: the foosel via photopin cc

The Next Big Thing

I was tagged for this post by Priya Sharma for which I'm grateful. It's a cool thing. Stop now and go immediately to Priya's site and read her interview about a story that she's very promptly sold! While waiting for her story to appear, you can read some of her other fine stories at Albedo One, Black Static (issue 28) and Interzone (current issue).

Next week, plus or minus a few time zones, Richard Jones (blogging here) speculative fiction writer and author of A Dude's Guide to Babies (pre-order now!) will be posting his answers to these questions.

1) What is the working title of your next book/short story/project?

My next published book will be Shaky Ground, due out in a few weeks. My next (still-in-my-head) book will be an alternate-historical mystery with the working title of Tainted Earth. The two don't have anything in common despite the titles and the German setting.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

This is a complicated and not completely linear thing, this genesis of ideas. I suspect it's probably that way with most writers. Anyway, I'll try.

Shaky Ground is the sequel to Primary Fault, the first book in my Schattenreich series. I got the idea for the first book when we first started working on the archeoseismology of the Roman ruins being excavated in the Archeological Zone in Cologne (the paper that came out of that project is open access, published by Springer Verlag and downloadable here). The events in the novel are all fictional, but the real world controversy surrounding the (still unsupported) hypothesis that an earthquake could have forced Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, to abandon his seat of government in Cologne for Aachen greatly inspired me. Even though the Schattenreich series is contemporary, I also have plans to do a few historical shorts linking the past and the present.

But what really caught my fancy was a certain Roman well – a part of the excavations in the middle of Cologne – just across from the Rathaus or City Hall, in fact. This Roman well, still in use in Charlemagne's time, kept bugging me, wouldn't let me go. Plus I had started reading heavily about Druids and continental Celts and knew that had to be a part of the story. Druids+Roman ruins+Earthquakes. It was enough to get started. Even though the Roman well doesn't come into play until Shaky Ground, it was always there, in the back of my mind while writing the first book.

So, complicated.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Fantasy suspense with a healthy dose of romance.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Ha! I love this question because actually answering it will totally ruin everyone's – including my own – private images of the characters in the book. After giving it much thought, there's only two characters I'd pin down with an actor/actress: Anne Hathaway would, I think, be the perfect Caitlin Schwarzbach. Marco Girnth, a German actor who is mainly known for his work in the television police procedural SOKO Leipzig (the show is not particularly riveting, but I do enjoy watching Marco Girnth :-)) would be the perfect Heinrich von der Lahn and matches the mental picture I have of him.

I'm still trying to figure out who could play Sebastian von der Lahn. He's the most complicated character in the series, and I have to admit, I'm completely stumped. There are probably a half dozen excellent German actors who could do the role justice. Specifying an actor to play Hagen von der Lahn remains beyond my abilities at the moment. Gus Schwarzbach is such an amalgam of people I've known in my life, that it would also be impossible for me to pin him down. From looks alone, though, Garth Brooks comes pretty darn close.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A tale of seismology, Druids, and an evil blonde.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-published under my imprint, Terrae Motus Books.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Four months. But it's taken me over three years to get it into publishable shape. It was a complete mess. It was the second novel (after Primary Fault) that I wrote. Even though I'm an incurable Pantser, Shaky Ground was the last novel I will ever write without some sort of a Road Map. I realized after it was finished that I didn't ever want to wander in the wilderness like that again.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Difficult, since it's a mix of real world science and contemporary fantasy. There's Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, but other than the Celtic cultural references and the romance aspects, the two books couldn't be more different. I would love to have it compared to Roger Zelazny's Amber series, but the comparison falls short once you get past the Otherworld/mythological aspects and the freaky Gothic castle.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

That's easy. Impending unemployment (that thankfully did not transpire!) Plus encouragement from another scientist who had written a novel (and gotten it published). I thought, if he could do it…so I sat down one day and started with Chapter 1. No plan. No real clue at all. Three months later I had Primary Fault. That was a little over five years ago. And after I finished, I immediately started writing the sequel, Shaky Ground. Everyone warned me away from doing that, from continuing to write books in a series before I had sold the first one. They were completely right. But I'm incredibly stubborn. And not so smart. However, I am immensely glad I did it. It's been a liberating experience, writing the books I always wanted to read. I'm now writing the fifth and final book in the series (if I change my mind on this, please just push me off a cliff). 

NoNoNoMo NanoWriMo

I'm through. Not Officially, since I've never done the Nano thing that way. It's too much information and too much connectedness for me.

Instead, I've chosen to look at the National Novel Writing Month, November, loaded as it is with hidden traps such as Thanksgiving and getting bogged down  by teaching ideas --- like the sudden decision, after acquiring, say, a new textbook that's just so wonderful that I can't resist or realizing that Excel 2010 is no longer even remotely amenable to the class syllabus that already exists, to completely overhaul one of my classes and simultaneously producing all of the new lectures on Powerpoint, and all this just before the semester begins --- breathes deep, it's all okay, really --- as just a way to get the lead out and truly tackle one of the writing or editing projects at or near the top of my list.

What this entails is, of course, still a stressful situation, even if Unofficial, because, let's face it, trying to write 50K in a month or even 40K or, say, do a complete edit of a novel of 138K is going to kick the normal non-paranormal type individual with only modest talents (moi) into a mode that I can only characterize as Space Captain.

It doesn't start out that way. But it ends up that way.

I chose to edit the third book in my Schattenreich fantasy series, Double-Couple, of said 138K length. I accomplished this in 11 days plus or minus a few hours, but it required a couple of near-all-nighters. But then I realized, hey, The November is only half done. We're not stressed out yet, are we? Nooooooo. Okay, let's do it again. So I did. It felt really good, Samantha Stallone jogging up those stairs punching the air good (er.....never mind). But only for about maybe thirty minutes. And then it hit me. My family is walking around with permanent frowns on, reminding me to change my underwear, the empty toilet paper roll, to push myself away slowly, from the keyboard. Hell, even the cat is sulking.

So now, yes, I am Officially wrung out, walking around like the Football Zombie in Plants and Zombies after he's lost his helmet (or better yet, Bucket Zombie without the bucket - how pathetic is that?) Therefore, the post for writers on how to handle Space Captain mode from Ruth Harris (Anne Allen's blog partner) that landed in my inbox two days ago (I only just now got around to reading it, dammit!), was a great relief.

It really is okay to admit to not having paranormal powers of my own. That I'm walking around wanting to eat someone else's braaaaains because mine is shriveled and shivering inside my cranium. That even emptying a few laundry baskets is a task that seems beyond me. So I'm going for chocolate, sports, and a good novel, and doing something nice for those I love, but not all at once.

Goodbye, Nano, until next year!

Niteblade : Let's Celebrate!

Niteblade opened its literary doors in 2007, just about the time I started writing seriously, as in submitting-work-serious. There have been many markets that have come and gone since then, and I have tried my luck with many of them, but Niteblade is still with us and still going strong. I'm proud to say that Niteblade was one of my very first sales! And if you've been following the blog train so far (I'm stop #18, I think), you'll realize that this theme reoccurs - Niteblade is a good place for authors starting out (and also returning authors - I'll get there again, someday!). The story that Rhonda Parrish, editor and publisher, picked up, Behind Blue Eyes, appeared in Issue #8, Of Warmth, Of Dragons, with wonderful illustrations by Marge Simon, including the one for Behind Blue Eyes.



BBE was one of those rare things - a story formulated and written in a burst of inspiration I got while editing a scientific paper about ants. That's right. Ants have always been great fodder for horror movies, and I couldn't resist making them a part of the second SF story I ever wrote. The idea (but not the ants) later morphed into a 'future event' for what has now become my first SF novel, Gravity's Gift (still in revision). In other words, I wanted to write a novel that would lead to the situation described in the story.

But the short story - a flash piece - was dark and nasty and not my usual type of story. So I didn't know where to place it. Then I found Niteblade, a cozy (but not safe, never safe!) home for dark fantasy and science fiction. I also have to say, it felt like being part of a family, as Rhonda has always included all her authors, past and present in her announcements and connections. I appreciate that, and I'm glad to be associated with the magazine and to help Rhonda celebrate her fifth year, 20 issues strong and verging on 21.

Twenty-one is a great number. It's the product of two prime numbers, three and seven, both of mystical quality. In Celtic mythology, three is everywhere, triple-headed goddesses, triple horns, curses that always come in threes. Seven abounds in many religions and myths. There are seven wonders, seven hills in Rome, and seven deadly sins. Combine those two numbers in a multiplicative way, and you get 21. It's a Fibonacci number - and it's got a lot of other names as well. That's right, 21 has street cred. It's a legal drinking age in many countries and the 'coming of age' age in many others. So if 5 years and 21 issues means that the magazine has 'come of age' then that's a great reason to celebrate. But I believe that genuinely good magazines continue to grow and evolve - rather than ripen - and Niteblade is definitely one of them.

We're getting close to the back of the blog train, and we're having a great time. We found that case of champagne they hid in the back of the closet, the fake blood, and the monster masks. Don't mind us at all. At least we're not dancing in the aisles. Not yet. You may have just hopped on from the previous carriage, Mark Rigney. Tomorrow we'll be leaping to the next one back at Dark Fantasy and Horror Central itself with a guest post from Sandy Leibowitz. 

Here, take this bottle with you, it's still mostly full, and pass it around.

The Official trailer for Primary Fault

Looking for Ground Truth in the High Fens

In seismology, ground truth is jargon that originated when discrimination of earthquakes and other seismic events from small nuclear blasts was a hot research field. It refers to the collection of data to verify the source or location of a seismic event other than just the seismic data available on a network. It could include satellite imagery or infrasound data, for example. That's a mouthful, but it really just means, verifying where something happened, seismically, from as many different kinds of data as are available. It's important, especially if the event places suspicion on a (possible) rogue state for testing nuclear weapons, to be able to verify the source of the event with as many kinds of data as possible.

Not as important as monitoring rogue states, I view research for fiction writing as an essential form of ground truth. These days, mostly, writers use the Internet as a primary source (more than is good for us), and when that isn't sufficient, must delve into books, scientific papers, newspaper articles, pursue conversations with experts, and watch films and documentaries. This kind of ground truth is especially important for historical fiction, but anytime you're writing fiction that takes place somewhere you don't know well or have never been to (a star system, the Jovian planets, or Des Moines, Iowa, for example), ground truth is highly desirable and sometimes fun.

Last Thursday, I did a bit of ground truth for the third book in my Schattenreich series (Double-Couple) by visiting the Hohes Venn (High Fen), part of the Ardennes and quite complicated geologically (meaning, I don't know enough about this to try and tell you about it). I think the important thing is that an impermeable layer of rock (in this case, I think it's Cambrian shale) creates the environment for the fens. I was mainly interested in the possibility that the Hohes Venn was potentially a sacred place in Iron Age times for the Celtic tribes that populated Belgium and the Rhineland and therefore had access to the moors and bogs that make up a good part of the fen.

There's not much literature - at least any I've found so far - to suggest it was a proven sacred place, but its proximity to the well-populated areas suggests that it could have been. And moors are well known for keeping their secrets - including bog bodies, valuable sacrificial items and so on (see, for example, the excellent, Dying for the Gods from Miranda Green, ISBN 978-0752425283). Well-preserved corpses and other artifacts have been discovered elsewhere in Germany when the peat bogs were mined and their contents exposed to the surface. But the Hohes Venn is a natural preserve and so is not subject to extensive peat bog mining.

Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, so I assumed I was safe in just making up a sacred sacrificial place in the fen that would still hold its 'power' today, two centuries after the Celts would have roamed its forests and bogs. I wanted to 'walk it' myself to get a feeling for what it would be like, all the better to add that something special to my story, and as further impetus to seek out additional information and literature (yes, research is downright addictive sometimes).

So, here's a bit of ground truth from the Hohes Venn, courtesy of my walking companion, Klaus Hinzen.

Approaching the High Fen

The journey is the way.

A bomb crater, now a vibrant biotope

The bog lake

Cotton grass

One of the many bogs with very red-tinged waters

Speculative Fiction and Me: The Longer Version

In addition to making me watch scary movies as soon as I was old enough to scream, my father read to me. Most often it was Dr. Seuss, so I'd say that was my first inoculation (along with Dracula and the Wolfman) into speculative fiction. My brothers were into the Berenstein Bears and Go, Dog. Go! (first published in 1961, it's still in print) and Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman. We all liked I Wish That I Had Duck Feet by Theo. LeSieg. I'd have to say my favorite Seuss was On Beyond Zebra. I still have all the originals and read them all to my son when he was small. Maybe there's a connection between Dr. Seuss and lovers of the fantastic, since my son is an avid fantasy reader. I've got them packed away in boxes now, awaiting the next generation of readers. 

But it was C. S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia that really got me turned on to fantasy. I was twelve when I checked it out of the Carrollton, Texas public library. After that, there was no returning to the candy-stripe nurses or young-girl-and-horse stories, although they represented fantasies of a different sort. Thankfully, my parents never censored my reading habits, so I also dived into things as diverse as the stories of Anais Nin and Anna Karenina, Ayn Rand and Anne Frank. By the time we got around to reading something in English class, I'd usually already read it.

Then there was this bookstore. I used to know Dallas - all the ways to get here and there - but it's been a while, and it's likely everything's changed quite drastically in the twenty years I've been in Germany. So I've forgotten exactly where it was. I'd like to say it was on the southwest corner of Inwood Rd. and Lover's Lane, but it could be that my memory deceives me. If anyone remembers this store, let me know. I'd appreciate it. Anyway, it was just a little bookshop, but they carried mostly SF, some fantasy, some horror, and some comics. I was working full-time as a secretary at the nearby medical school and studying on my own nickel, so I didn't have a lot of disposable cash, but most of what I had went into that shop, and it wasn't long before I'd run through much of the inventory.

Once you get into graduate level work in whatever field of study you've chosen, you usually begin to run into mentors who are going to help you along. I was no different and am hugely grateful to all my early mentors in geophysics - all men - including one ex-husband - who helped me along and guided me into my areas of specialization. Well, this bookstore was my speculative fiction mentor. It's shelves guided me deeper into science fiction and fantasy. The best thing about that shop was the completeness of their series. You could be pretty sure if books one and two of a trilogy were available, that they'd have book three shelved with it or would reorder it quickly. That was the only really frustrating thing on my journey through books at that point - finishing book one or two before Monday, before I could go back and buy the next one (Sundays in those days, the shops were usually closed).

I don't remember when that shop closed, but I do remember it as being a very sad thing. Even though most of the bookstore chains at that point carried respectable speculative fiction collections, it wasn't the same. That store was a magical kingdom, created just for me, I always thought. It was on a busy intersection, and had no real foot traffic to speak of. You went in there because you wanted to. There weren't any comfortable chairs to sit and browse books - there weren't any chairs. Just a few aisles with shelves. And a friendly clerk, more often knowledgeable than not.

Even though I was an early reader, self-taught at age four, and always loved reading, if I had to draw a line backwards, however curvy and loopy it turned out to be, that bookstore would be the real starting point for my getting fired up about reading (and writing) the kind of stuff that I do.

Life Behind the Slushpile, Part Two

Originally posted in Allegory, Summer, 2011

 First of all, if it makes you feel any better to picture us naked and chained to our computers when you send in your stories, then go ahead. It used to work for me whenever I had to give a presentation in college. Well, almost always. It depended on who was sitting in front of me and the images raised.

Okay, no more silliness. This is serious business. Really. Are you ready? I'll summarize the process first before we get to the good stuff.

You send in your story. As per the guidelines, of course. Then Ty Drago, Allegory's editor, divvies up the stories to us – the legendary Allegory Elf Babes. The legendary part is because no one has actually ever seen one of us – we've never even seen each other – but we all exist, at least as far as anything exists and is not just a random conflagration (erm, configuration?) of supersymmetric strings…oh, never mind. We are the Assistant/Associate Editors whose names appear on the magazine.

So, the Elf Babes (and Ty) each take their pile of stories and read them. Why the skeptical faces? We do read them – all of them – and, as far as I know, we read them all the way through. I will admit to skimming on some of those 9K monsters if the story doesn't warrant the length, but that's usually near the end of the submission period when the story batches are piling up and Ty's got steam coming out of his nose (I can't actually see this, but I can sense it).

When we read a batch, we write a few relevant comments about each story, aimed at helping and illuminating. Unfortunately, in my case, it's usually only a sentence, at the most two. Sometimes, if the story really doesn't jive with me at all, I have a hard time coming up with anything to say. That doesn't mean the story is necessarily bad, it's just not something I feel I want to or can comment sufficiently on to help make it better. Then we make a decision to reject the story or bump it up to Ty. This last category is known in Allegory parlance as a 'maybe'. Very, very rarely, an author will get asked for a rewrite. I only know this from hearsay. I've never asked for a rewrite.

A note about response times. We try to do relatively quick turnarounds. We do. But sometimes, especially towards the end of the submission period…well, things pile up. And since Ty is so very nice and tries very hard not to bug us except to remind us that he's got a gajillion stories still to distribute, some of us feel especially guilty, and we ask Ty to send us another batch. So then we've got two batches to finish up. You get the picture, right?

At the end of the submission period, Ty takes all of the 'maybes' and selects eight of them for publication in the next issue of Allegory. The rest get Honorable Mentions. Then we Elf Babes get a few weeks to do our own writing and rest up for the next submission period while Ty wrestles with getting the magazine ready for publication.

So far so good. But what do we look for? And how does a 'maybe' translate into a 'yes'?

As an answer to the first question, I can only speak for myself. But when I see a well-written story, I'm happy. On top of that, it has to be a story that makes me want to read it to the end to see what will happen. And when I've gotten that far, it has to be an ending that makes me glad I read it all the way through. That's it. Nice writing. A story that propels the reader forward. An ending that justifies the journey. If all three of those things are present, I'm usually well inclined to give a story a 'maybe' and send it up to Ty.

There are also questions of personal taste involved, and those will vary depending on which of us your story gets sent to. Ty does not impose any pre-conceived ideas of what he is looking for on us. We send up things we like. Maybe it's a less than efficient way to do things, but personally, I rather like it. It makes working at Allegory fun and interesting because I don't have to second-guess whether another person will like the stories I'm sending up.

There are times when none of the stories I picked make it into the magazine, but I usually hit on at least one or two 'keepers'. I imagine it averages out over time. And even if not, I think it's a sign of a magazine's well-roundedness if differences in taste are apparent. That's the advantage of being a smaller, non-professional ezine. We don't have to say up front, 'read the magazine to see what we publish'. We publish just about everything if it has a speculative slant and if it's good and we like it.

So, in answer to the second question, I can only give you this advice. It works for Allegory, and I think it will work for any magazine, pro, semi-pro, or even f-t-l. Just write the best story you can. Write a story because you want to write it, and it's a story you would actually like to read. There are some who might recommend, 'write a story for a particular market'. Maybe they're right. I think this is particularly true if you are trying to get into a themed issue or an anthology. Or if you're really shooting for that one mag, and you've just got to crack it – then take out a subscription and read all the stories you can to get a flavor for what they're looking for.

But really, just keep writing. Maybe you'll have to consign a few of them to your own private slushpile hell along the way. We've all done that. But if you keep writing and and keep submitting, one day it will pay off. And keep reading. Read all kinds of stories, all over the place.

Oh, and before I forget – one last piece of advice. Maybe volunteer to read slush for one of those magazines. It will likely make the learning curve for crafting a good story less steep, especially for those of us not financially equipped for attending those coveted writing workshops we all dream about. And because it's just darn fun. I enjoy reading your stories. Thank you the privilege and for giving me your trust.

Life Behind the Slushpile (Part 1) appeared as a guest blog here on Colin Harvey's Suite 101 blog in May, 2009.

Life Behind the Slush Pile

Originally posted on Colin Harvey's blog, May, 2009

Joining the ranks of those whose job it is to read submitted stories has not significantly increased my own publication rate since I joined Ty Drago's editorial staff at Allegory in August of 2008. Not yet, anyway. But it will. I'm learning a lot about the things that make a story work from reading 'slush' – a term we do not use to refer to the stories in our pile. They are called submissions, and rightly so!

During the Allegory submission period, Ty distributes the stories as they come in to whichever of us (timidly) raises our hand. I suppose every editor has their own approach to reading stories. Mine is simple. I read them, one after the other, all the way through – regardless of whether overwritten, badly written or 'I just plain don't like'. It does take time. But it's my job, and I've discovered that I rather enjoy it.

If I find myself really liking a story, I'll break out the pickles and crisps while I'm reading and make it a festive occasion. We throw the really good stuff into a 'maybe' pile for later sorting into the stories chosen for that issue. The rejected stories all get a personal note, even if only a short one. It's the magazine's policy and I think a good one. Here's how I picture an author's response after getting back one of my rejections: "Oh, they hated the surprise ending with the zombie budgies – I can work on that" or "I knew having the three-headed alien puke green slime all over the girl – with all three heads – was over the top." When I've written 'please keep trying', I actually mean it. It is especially encouraging to see an author who I've rejected before submit a new story that is better, closer to being what I consider 'publishable' for Allegory.

Because that's what it's all about, really. Enjoyment of the craft of writing stories and getting better at it.