Some Math

Today, my insane project was to try to figure out about how many speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) stories are published per year at a pro rate.

Obviously this count is not remotely scientific.

Counts here are derived from using reported frequency of publication times either the number of stories in the last issue or the average number of stories in the last set of issues. Question marks are presented when content updates on an irregular schedule, even if it's frequent. This count excludes anthologies (even annuals), magazines for children, stuff open only to Australians or Canadians, and magazines set around a shared pre-set world. It does, however, include magazines which are not currently accepting submissions, magazines open mostly to Canadians and Australians, magazines with narrowly themed issues, some magazines that have only put out one or two issues, and some magazines that have missed an issue or two. The count does not include novellas and novelettes, as a rule, though several of the bigger magazines totally do these. It doesn't generally include flash either, though there's a big giant asterisk on that generally for Daily Science Fiction, which publishes 260 stories a year and tends toward low word count.

Again, I want to stress. These are rough numbers. This is a guess.

AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review- ????
Analog- 12x a year 6 short stories- 72
Apex- monthly 6 stories- 72
Asimov's- 12 x 6- 72
Beneath Ceaseless Skies- 26 x 2- 52
Cemetery Dance- 6 x 10 - 60
ChiZine- ???
Clarkesworld- 12 x 6 = 72
Crossed Genres- 12 x 3 =36
Daily Science Fiction- 260 x 1 = 260
Escape pod- 52 x 1 = 52
Fantasy and Science Fiction- 6 x 10 = 60
Fog Horn* - 12 x 4 = 48
Inscription*- 12 x 1 =12
Jamais Vu - 4 x about 7 =28
Lightspeed -12 x 10 = 120
Lore -  2 x 9 = 18
Musa - 12 x 5 = 60
Nightmare - 12 x 4 = 48
One Buck Horror- ? x 6 = ??
Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show- 4 x 5.5= 22
Phobos - ?? x 15= ?
Shimmer- ? x ???= ?
Shock Totem- 2 x 13= 26
Strange Horizon- 36 x 1.75 = 63
Tor 12 x 5 = 60
Unlikely Story- 3 x 6 - 18
Waylines- 6 x 3.75 = 22.5
Wily Writers- ??

So. 1353.5, even without the magazines I didn't get a total for.

There (probably) are AT LEAST one thousand three hundred and fifty three professional rate speculative fiction stories published every year.

That's not an exact number (it's not even a whole number). But it is a big number.

That number's slightly less big when you look at the tables of contents and see Stephen King, Ted Chiang, Neil Gaiman, Laid Barron, Joe Hill, Michael Swanwick, Jack Ketchum, and other big pretty names on the front covers. But it's still a big number.

It's a big enough number to sneak away a tiny fragment of, certainly. 

Self-Examination

That's right, it's navel-gazing time for Lesli again.

Please don't take anything that follows as a sign that I'm looking for cheering up. I'm hoping writing things down helps me figure out answers to some of the questions I've been working on.

I've been in a weird position lately with writing. I have something that I can do fairly easily, which is take a small germ of an idea and bang out a first draft story with a beginning, middle, and end and a couple of characters in it. They're not BAD little stories, though they're often pretty obvious. The ideas are often worth a smile. They're significantly better little stories than I wrote a couple of years ago.

But I'm dissatisfied with them. They're not good enough.

I had a writer friend come by the last week and we talked about process. Mine is very often slap-dash. All throughout my academic career I could write a paper the night before and run away cackling from the scene with a relatively high score. When I joined a writer's group with monthly contests (and later one with weekly prompts) I did relatively well by the same methods. I've sold multiple stories that were written fairly quickly; not terribly complicated pieces, but small quirky things that were over too quickly to be examined all that closely. The bulk of my sales are flash.

I really like quirky flash- I enjoy how much a tightly focused story telling structure lets me leave to the reader's imagination by implication and by omission. I'm very very good at the discipline/skill of saying "that information doesn't need to be in this story because that's not what this story is about" (laugh if you want, that's very hard for a fair number of people, and is the genesis of numberless info-dumps).

But I don't want that to be the only trick my pony has, and I find these days I'm much more self-aware about when I'm failing to live up to my ambitions. I wrote a story about two weeks ago and when I went back today to see what it was I'd marked down as a finished story (I keep a count of goals accomplished or not) I had completely forgotten what it was about or what happened. It's not a bad story- it has scary psychic twins, it has some fun images and some weird behavior, it has a character arc for the narrator somewhat separate to whole psychic twin bit; and of course it has a beginning, middle, and reasonably satisfying end- but I was so unimpressed by it I actually completely erased it from my mind. Like doing etch-a-sketch drawings when what you really want is to be a capable painter.

I'm worried that volume is not helping me, and trying to make sure I produce a certain volume in the interest of constant practice is detrimental because it keeps me from focusing on taking time to craft something more ambitious.

Except I also tried doing that and ended up just staring at the screen in despair when that wasn't structurally sound enough to avoid crashing into flaming ruin.

I've been trying to focus on editing these last few months; taking mediocre stories and making them good ones. I'm getting to the point where I do feel like I'm making the stories better, at least (I had an earlier period where I abandoned a lot of things because every pass at editing I did seemed to make them worse), but nothing has turned out as good as I would like.

I recognize that these are growing pains. I have improved, and I'm continuing to improve, but I'm at a point right now where I can't see what the next productive step is, and treading water feels exhausting. There are a lot of false starts, and right now I'm spending a lot of mental time on forensics of my own inadequacies- where did these things fall short of being the stories I wanted? What could I have done better?

Part of the problem, though, I think is that I want to surprise myself and lately I've been doing some pretty unsurprising things. It's possible I've run to the limit of what I can currently do intuitively. I've been trying to make sure I'm doing exercises to counter that, but training in any direction requires me understanding what I need to fix and working out  a program specifically for that.

So, yeah, like I said, growing pains. Looking for answers. If you're still reading, bless you for your endurance. 

Trespass, an Anthology!

I have officially become an editor as well.

So here's what happened:

A few years back I signed up for a writing site with most of those associates you see over there on the right of the blog. In those days few if any of us were published, but we helped each other out as best we could.

So fast forward a bit, and now all of us are published, and some of us recollected in best ofs and the like. In order to continue helping each other out, we got together and bundled several of our previously published stories. Our hope is that as we make further sales, anyone who goes looking for one of us will find all of us, and hopefully fall in love with the people they hadn't seen before.

The anthology's only 99 cents- perfect try-it-out price. Don't be shy. Go pick one up for your e-book device. 

Year in Rejections 2012

So, yeah.

People often say one of the most important things you can develop as a writer is a thick skin. I know a lot of new writers fret about rejection, but really, it's not so bad.

I've taken the identifying information off of these because it's not per se about me, or the stories, or the editors. Most of these are form letters, some of them are provide exceptional personal feedback. All of them are very nice, and I wrote most of them back to thank them afterwards (where it was not requested I did not, and certainly in every instance where they wrote me personally).

Anyway, here are my rejections from 2012.

Jake Kerr on Massive Editing

Inkpunks is a good place anyway, and one that I've recommended before, but if you haven't seen Jake Kerr talk about editing The Old Equations you really should check it out. 

Awkward Critique

So, in general, I assume most people reading this blog are either writers or Russian spambots (Здравствуйте, робот тараканов!). Assuming you are the former, you're probably in a critique circle of some kind, either online or in person. And statistics dictate if you are, eventually someone is going to hand you something painful.

And I don't just mean the kind of painful where homophone errors proliferate a like spell-check proof rabbit plague across the hot Australian terrain of their story, I mean the kind of painful where it's a story in which black people are all poor because they're lazy criminals, or women exist only to tempt unsuspecting men to evil and ruin, or you WILL go to Hell unless you follow X religious doctrine. And you're going to read this story and have to say something to this person. Because that's what critique groups are there for. (Alternately, their story may make the blanket assumption that anyone religious is pants-on-head stupid, that all men are monsters waiting for their chance to rape anyone they can, or that white people are all rich imperialists who are genetically incapable of compassion, you know, pick your poison).

What often makes this harder is that the person in question will very likely not agree that what you find to be a problematic aspect of their story is in any way problematic. People not listening to you in general is one of the hard parts about a critique group anyway, but it's worse in these cases because it's very hard not to put someone on the defensive with "hey, are you aware this sounds kind of racist?"

So, how do you let someone know that they're being potentially quite offensive? Honestly, the dynamics of your group figure into it a lot. Being polite and gentle always makes bad news easier to swallow, and as a general critique strategy, I find it helps to start with "I think what you were trying to accomplish here is ______, but it isn't working for me as it is because of ________" (eg. "I gather you're trying to show that your main character is kind of a likable rough around the edges guy, but for me as a reader the macho way he bonds with the guys by calling his girlfriend a dirty bitch is really off-putting and makes it hard to sympathize"). It's a hard problem because so much of this is context and tone, and what one writer can pull off in a compelling way (like the above example) another might just not be able to make look like anything other than meanspiritedness.

When possible, I try to bring this up to people privately, especially in an internet group. As hard as it is to keep from being defensive when just one person is telling you this, it's going to multiply for every additional person able to throw their two cents in.

I also try not to argue with people, because you almost never win. I let them know the read I'm getting off it and why (always, always point to specific examples), make my case, and if they say "no, I think you're wrong," that's it. We're both entitled to an opinion and in the end, it's their story, not mine. If someone's not at least a little open to the idea that they might be misrepresenting someone, or subverting a whole group of people for their own didactic narrative purpose, telling them twice is probably not going to be more effective than telling them once.

But I do think it's important to tell them once. After all, you're the critiquer, and it's a valid critique.  

LitReactor

I try to be on the lookout for sites that run writing advice- especially useful writing advice (you know, not just "have a blog", "build your brand", and "feel the fiction"). I've been poking around LitReactor and it seems to be pretty handy (my favorite so far is the article on visceral horror by Jack Frickin' Ketchum). There's a pay-only section of the site that includes more articles and a workshop forum, but I haven't paid, so I can't tell you anything about those (though there are lots of free services for critiquing).

Anyway, go have a read, it's nice. 

Checkhov's Gun Rack

This one was a request by a good friend. I'm on a writing group that engages in a weekly exercise wherein one of us will put up a prompt and all of us will write for one hour and then share the results. I've actually gotten some really fun (albeit unpolished) stories from this, and I enjoy both writing and world building on the fly.

Because I only have an hour, I usually won't spend to much time figuring out what I'm going to do. As soon as I have a vague concept (usually related to the prompt), a character with one or two traits (eg. a shy student, a crabby old woman, an outlaw poet), a goal (eg. to be married, to be normal, to protect a colony of monkeys), and an obstacle, I dive in.

And the first thing I do is start putting in detail completely at random.

Alright, not completely at random. If I want to write a funny story, it will be funny detail; same for horror, romance, what have you. Details will be as in-period as I can make them without research if it's a period piece. Things won't be per se infodumped- in part because I'm not attempting coherency yet- but at every juncture I can without stopping the action, I'll drop in something specific. The heroine has five children, two of whom have died. The garden is full of mangoes and cinnamon trees. The love interest worked in a cigar shop until it burned down. The town's main export is gourmet cheese. Umbrellas have become fashionable even on sunny days. It is religiously forbidden for women to wear shoes. Just, you know, whatever. It doesn't need an internal logic or consistency. I'm building on the fly.

In trying to explain this and grasping for terms, I started calling it Chekhov's gun rack. You know some of them have to be fired by the end, but you can get away without shooting all of them. In improv theater terms, it's called "saying yes"- taking every new idea put forward as true and doing whatever you have to not to contradict it.

By the time I've inserted half a dozen to a dozen details (and I've been writing this whole time), patterns will have begun to suggest themselves. Perhaps our heroine, now a crabby older woman, lost those two children in an epidemic that caused people to radically rethink their faith and adopt all sorts of new, troublesome, fundamentalist practices, like women being forbidden from wearing shoes. This offers up a great potential conflict, since she and her love interest can be of different opinions as to whether or not this is a good thing- which in turn gives them something to believe and reasons to believe it (being righteous didn't save his shop from burning down, did it?). It also presents some additional obstacles for my main character (there are jobs she can't safely do and places she can't safely go without shoes- or indeed, perhaps she's been denied the protection of footwear she has some sort of wound or old injury that results in a limp). What I can't consolidate (mangoes, cheese, umbrellas) becomes background detail and ambiance (in this case it means our setting is tropical, linked to broader trade networks, probably industrialized, and relatively prosperous on the global scale), and what I can weave in starts eventually (hopefully) to support itself and look like it was planned from the start. Occasionally, I'm left with something striking but orphaned (I wrote an alien invasion story where I'd stated there was no more coffee anywhere in the world, but left it unsupported as to why or how it was connected), but distracting little bits like that are pretty easy to delete later.

Just as a note- I'll often throw out the first idea I have for connections or extrapolations (in the above example my first impulse was to write the woman as grouchy about how things have changed and her lost freedom, while the man was a true believer, but I think it's actually more charming the other way around, as the heroine then goes from someone who cannot fight against the overwhelming currents of her times to someone who refuses to engage in acts that would actually benefit her, because they run counter to her convictions. It also makes for a more sympathetic love interest. I envision a gentle, sad old man.) The easiest answer is often not the most interesting one.

The process doesn't lend itself to careful world building, but I find I really like the results, which end up as often as not being kind of quirky and unexpected. Honestly, even when I have world-built, I still do some of this, because I find it much easier (and honestly more fun) than trying to start by making a complete and consistent world and extrapolate the details that logically follow from it.

In my experience, life itself is chaotic, and full of silly little things that don't fit neatly. Like a brutal dictator kidnapping a film director to make his personal rubber-suit monster movie, or a large amount of the red food dye you eat being ground up insect shells. It's not always something you could have come up with logically, but it makes the world a more interesting place.

Writing vs. Therapy

An article. Make of it what you will. 

Story a Day in May (II)

I'm doing Story a Day in May again this year. The rules are as simple as can be- 31 first draft stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. They don't have to be long, but they have to be complete.

I did this last year, and it was a very productive exercise. One of the stories from the batch so far has been published- Wendigo Bake Sale, which just ran at the Drabblecast- and there are at least a few others which I think can be polished to professional quality. All in all, that by itself would justify keeping up with it, but there were a couple of other interesting things that came of it as well.

I ended up writing more, which is probably to be expected. The goal wasn't any particular volume of words, but often stories go longer than what I had set as my daily goal.

I also ended up writing more experimentally. I wrote something in second person future which will never see the light of day, but which was fun and educational to create. I wrote a story that was one giant sentence, mostly a list. I tried to deliberately write in the style of other famous writers, just for a giggle. Every day I knew I had to do something, but I also knew I'd be doing something again tomorrow, so if today's something was a little indulgent, it didn't matter. I think every now and again, playing around like that, experimenting just for the joy of it, is an incredibly valuable thing to do as a writer.

Because really, when you get right down to it, it's all supposed to be fun, isn't it?

(by the way, of absolutely infinite story a day value are the many essays on flash fiction by Mr. Bruce Holland Rogers)

The Problem With Writing Advice

The problem with writing advice is basically that we're all beautiful, individual little snowflakes who are determined to fail at writing in an infinity of different and creative ways. I, for example, tend to flap my hands and whinge impotently about how whatever I'm working on isn't ready for anyone to look at it yet. The advice I need as a writer tends to be in the form of "ways to know when it's good enough" and "just send it out there, tiger, it has to grow up someday." There are other people like me, certainly. But there are also a number of people who will pound out a first draft and put it into an e-mail without so much as running a spell check. The last thing they need is encouragement about submitting.

Writing involves dozens of discreet, albeit related, skills; grammar, rhythm, pacing, vocabulary, plot building, character, word play, formatting, market savvy, editing, world building, research, self-discipline, self-motivation, quality assessment, and so on. And each of us is probably on at least slightly different places on the road to perfection in each of these. Not to mention none of us have exactly the same temperament regarding the consumption of advice; I know some people whose principle motivation is spite against people who have dared to suggest a best way to do something. Generalized writing advice, no matter how well meaning, is often likely to either not really apply to you personally, or be so universal as to be true but not particularly helpful.

That said, I think you should probably read it all, and take it for what it's worth. The best thing, honestly, would be to have a talented, well-informed professional who had read your entire body of work and studied the market, and could give you tailored, useful feedback, but honestly, the ratio of professional authors to author hopefuls is soul-crushingly skewed, and professional writers are actually busy people who are not likely to have the time to read everything you've written. A group of peers can be helpful, but they're also likely to have about the same knowledge and market set you do; and as such they may not just be unsure, they run the risk, through no fault of their own and not for want of earnest good intentions, of being very much wrong.

In the end, I think you have to cultivate a certain capacity for self-assessment and careful reading. Know what you need and know how to recognize advice that might help you, then try it and see if it works. If it doesn't, have the self-awareness to know whether you're doing it wrong, or whether that just wasn't the advice for you. It's hard to do, but in the end, I think it works out better than looking outside for advice to write you a neat, concise little map. Advice written for a general audience doesn't know where you are, and as such it can't tell you the quickest way to where you're going. 

Books For Kids, But Probably Not In the Way You Think

As it says above.

Hulk Vs. The Monomyth

The Hulk Film Critic takes on shallow formulaic interpretations of Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces. 

On Consistent Production

Alright, I don't talk much about my personal life on this blog. This is a conscious decision I've made both because I tend toward being a bit more of a private person generally, and also because I don't generally think you all would be terribly interested in hearing about the minutia of my life.

Today I bring it up because I tend to be one of those people who says, listen, if you don't make time for writing, it just won't happen. And generally I believe that's true.

I've got two weeks coming up where I don't think I'm going to get any writing done at all. At my physical, paying job I am scheduled this week for 60 hours of work, 50 of it in situations where it's unlikely I will get any significant breaks. After that I'm going to spend a week playing host to a visitor who's very important to me. I don't anticipate getting a lot done either of those weeks.

And I think that's okay.

For one thing, I intend to make it up. I'm below my goals for the whole year, but not as far behind as I was this time last year. It's a process.

But I also think that the time you spend writing isn't a zero-sum game. Obviously the time you spend doing something that isn't writing is time when you can't write, but the other side of that is that you need to have something to write about and you need to have the energy to write. You can't just treat it like a grindstone, and you certainly can't let it become something you resent. Life is beautiful and sometimes you've got to step out and grab a couple fistfuls of inspiration; learn something and come back to your writing bringing greater insight and experience with you. Can't grow as a writer without growing as a person, basically.

Which is not to justify not ever writing, if you're one of those people I need to restate that for. But it is to say if it's all you do, it's going to suffer for it. 

Ten Non-Rules

From the fabulous people at io9.

Dear Literature

A really adorable private letter to Literature, from Genre.

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Happy Valentines Day, Internet!

While I wait for my heart-shaped sausage pizza to be ready, I thought I'd talk about something topical: Sex.

Or more specifically, the writing thereof.

I generally tend to think of sex as something I don't write much, but that doesn't hold up to any serious scrutiny. Most of the characters in my stories are sexually active, many even sexually aggressive- I don't have a lot of patience for that coy, nervous first part of romances, where people are wringing their hands and thinking "ohmygosh does he like me?" The story that's being reprinted in Aoife's Kiss next month starts out with a casual hookup (followed by a vivisection, because... well, why not?), but on the other hand I do tend to glide over a lot of the details. I find myself generally treating it much like I do other character traits and interactions. Unless a character is a fanatic about her car, I'm probably not going to give more information than, for example "a black SUV in good condition" or "a red Mustang" or "the pickup her father had kept running since the depression" (since I'm not personally a car person, I'll generally give less). I'm certainly not going to write a whole paragraph about it, unless it's a major point in the story. Likewise, I find I tend to give information about sex that's little more than "on the cold stove", "messy and embarrassing", "well, at least it seemed like she had a good time", or "with handcuffs and heavy tongue; standard, but adequate". I think part of it is that if I've written a character conflict, by the time the characters have sex, either it's resolved successfully or the sex came before and isn't related to the conflict. And if the conflict isn't between the characters making whoopie, then the sex is not any more narratively important than that pick up truck- it's interesting and it adds character development, but it doesn't need its own paragraph.

I've read a number of books with sex scenes, and they have a tendency to fall into three camps: 1) good sex scenes were two developed characters come into a scene with an established conflict of dominance, emotional attachment, confidence, etc- whatever it is, something that can either get better or worse by the end of a sex scene; 2) lame sex scenes in which there is no conflict, just a kind of point by point "and then this happened" in a way that kind of feels like the writer's nudging you for a bro high five (I say that, but lady writers are just as guilty); 3) rape scenes, where the conflict is, of course, obvious.

Actually because I enjoy horror, I should probably add a subset 4) the scene where there's endless, off-putting objectification and sexual tension build up, and then one party turns into a monster and eats the other. Seriously, this is not a twist ending anymore. Please stop doing it.

I have to give props to romance writers here. While the romance books I've read have some sex scenes that have made me giggle like a middle schooler looking up "butt" in the dictionary, I've also never scanned over them thinking "blah blah blah penis blah blah blah oh baby blah blah suck". I've read thoroughly and turned the next page (also there's not very many sex scenes in romance books, and allegedly if you read a lot of them, you can open straight to the page number where you know they will be, based on a formula of sexing). But then again the central romance plot is pretty much always getting to know the other person in a new relationship, and sex is a reasonable part of that process.

The second class of sex scene- the one where it seems to happen on some remote island with nothing to do with the rest of the plot (or in the worst case scenario where the "plot" appears to be nothing more than a framing device for the sex scenes)- always makes me uncomfortable. In practice it tends to be the longest and most explicit of the examples (unless we're counting four) even though in theory there's no reason it needs to be and I always get the feeling that the author expects me as a reader to be having a menage-a-une over. I mean... if it's not doing anything narratively productive, then clearly it's pornography, right? Which I suppose is all well and good if you want pornography, but is obnoxious if you've come into it looking to read a story.

It's also very hard not to feel about it the way one feels about Mary Sue fiction- that it's self-indulgent wish fulfilment, especially because this sex tends to involve at least one super hot character, usually not the one whose viewpoint the story is told through.

I think there is a part of us that wants there to be perfect sex- maybe as a kind of breather, maybe as a reward or even just something nice for characters we identify with. Maybe even just because we hate to write about sex being disappointing or conflicted- the same way we often like happy endings to be wrapped up and cleanly happy. But, I mean, how much space would you devote to a character having a really delicious piece of cake? How much cake eating would you read before you start scanning down to the point where the ship blows up? Even if the cake is a reward for a character having gone through fifteen pages of horrible unsuccessful diets, isn't there an upper limit?

Anyway, I'm off to pick up a heart shaped pizza. Y'all go on and celebrate love in your own special ways.

Happy Valentine's Day, Internet!

What Do You WANT to Write?

It's actually kind of funny, because I've said, multiple times, that knowing the answer to this question is (and should be) one of the fundamental parts of writing. But when I sat down and asked myself, my answers were really pretty vague. I want to write something fun and beautiful, I want to write something of lasting quality. Statements like that mean only a little more than nothing.

The first things that come to mind are in terms of other people's fiction where I think "yeah, that's the sort of thing I'd like to write," rather than something really sui generis. For specific stories, I'll sometimes have a very clear picture of what I'm trying to achieve, but just as often I'll be flying be the seat of my pants, and vision is something that will come up int he rewrite. I don't think either is necessarily a bad way to work, but it has been weirding me out since I asked myself the question.

I'm also forced to admit that sometimes when I have a specific idea in mind for a story, particularly if it's ambitious or important to me, I start to slow down and fret every time the story veers away from living up to that expectation. I don't think goals are necessarily counterproductive- I tend to think you actually need them if you're going to right focused, directed fiction, but I also can't exactly ignore my own experiences with this pitfall.

So... all you out there in internet land- what is your relationship to goals writ large and for specific pieces of writing.

On Picking Projects

I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to things I could be doing with my writing time. I have multiple notebooks full of ideas- some of them even sketched out into acts and arcs. I have what's frankly become a shameful number of first drafts and stories I really meant to finish. I have some novels that are not ready to send out yet. And on top of that, I'll very often sit down and just bang out something new, either for a prompt or a specific anthology opening.

Picking what to do is something I really need to be better at.

Mur Lafferty once said she has a big jar with all her projects in it, and she will draw one at a time from the jar, work on it until it's done, and then draw another one. I'm not quite that disciplined- in fact I find when I'm stuck, going off and doing something small and different will often jostle me out of my funk. On the other hand, there have certainly been things I've walked away from and failed to come back to.

At present, the first for me is social- if I've promised a story to someone, if it's a group activity with friends, if it's something for a project someone I like is doing, that will usually take precedence.

Secondly it's impersonal deadlines- deadlines have just always been a big kick in the pants for me, and I'm trying to stay more aware of upcoming anthology and themed publication deadlines, and either write to them or find a story that fits well enough but needs a little polishing.

Then there's the question of moments of inspiration. Lately I've been of the opinion that when you've got the surging drive to work on something, you may as well work on it until it's done, so that's a spanner in the works. Fun is very often a main motivator for me, because I'm resigned to not turning a great deal of profit on this.

Then there's shame. There are things I've started and meant to finish, and knowing I haven't finished them fills me with that productive sort of self-loathing that means I have to correct the deficit I have allowed to happen.

Honestly, this is something I need to be much more disciplined about, and probably something for which I need to form some sort of plan, but on the other hand, I really do enjoy the strange spontaneous turns things take when I fall in love with an idea, or rediscover something fun.

I don't know, how do you fine folks out there in internet land handle this situation?

On Length

Actually they say it's the girth of a story that determines how satisfying it is.

Right then, penis jokes aside, I've been thinking quite a bit about the length of stories recently.

I am a woman who deeply enjoys a good bit of flash fiction (under 1000 words). I've had folk who are more oriented toward long fiction express to me that they can't imagine what kind of story you can tell in 1000 words or less. After all, it's not room for a complex plot, it's not enough space to develop characters, not much can really happen. That's sort of true, but the other side of it is that 1000 words is just about the amount of time it takes to set up an expectation in the reader and then confound it. It's the length of a surprise. It's the tipping point where a really good joke becomes a story. It's the time it takes to survey an iceberg and realize 90% of it is under the water. When you already know the characters because they're stocks, archetypes, or allusions, it's the amount of time you need to get the other side of a story you've heard before. It's the time you need to establish a mood, whether it's paranoia, sadness, terror, joy. It's about the length of time a reader will put up with something daring and experimental.

Bruce Holland Rogers has some great articles on flash and the different ways to write it, and he does far more credit to it than I can here. I like flash in part because I have trouble sitting down and committing to big projects. I get ideas quickly, and if I'm doing something longer I get them mid-project, so flash is a length I can finish without distraction. I'm always amazed when I write something very short, and people tell me they think I could really expand it out. Often I don't want to. All the interesting bits of the story are there- the parts from the point where the characters resolve that the problem can no longer be avoided to the point where the solution becomes inevitable. Everything outside of that is just set-up and clean-up, and not the real show. And if you're just there for the guitar solos, why watch the roadies?

I suppose I read more short stories than anything. I didn't use to so much, when I was a teenager, but around the time I got my first job I realized how much I love fiction you can finish in one sitting. If there's any single person to whom I owe the largest part of the writer I am now, it's probably Ellen Datlow, who was the horror editor for about 20 years of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (though honestly the line between Horror and Fantasy was always very fluid in these books). Shorts don't have the attention-deficit, pure sugar rush of good flash, but on the other hand they give you time to develop at least one world-changing idea, one interesting character, or one poigniant relationship. You can still do very good iceberg work in short form- New Yorker style literary fiction is really good for condensing a person's entire life into 5000 words or less. Or you can tell one decent adventure or detective story- you have room for clues and minibosses if you're good at pacing. It's enough time to explain and explore the main different thing about your alien world. It's long enough that you get invested, but not so long that a surprise at the end feels like you've been had. It's enough time for somebody to have one epiphany.

Still, it's very easy to feel like shorts are stalling and puffing out their word count. The margin of error is smaller (though not as small as flash). Lately I've been writing more of my stories at around the 7000 word mark. There's a couple of reasons for this- the main one is putting in more characters and concentrating on a changing relationship. I enjoy the type of stories I'm getting out of it, but at the same time I'm still learning how to make a story that size not feel overburdened and unfocused. It feels like a weird place for pacing, but I'm convinced with practice I'll get more comfortable with it.

Novels. Oy vey novels. I really do understand that if I ever want to make money, I need to write novels, and I promise I do get the allure of following a set of characters through something complex, weaving in little subplots, giving everything weight and complexity, having the space to develop multiple in jokes and expectations, having space to luxuriate in scene-setting tangents, motif action, and other relevant and buttressing digressions. And the rate at which you can parcel out information, not to mention the ultimate amount you can disperse across the length of the work, is pretty appealing; you can deliberately bury quite a bit and dig it up later. All that is awesome, but... It's frightening to think of having that many moving parts, that many potential loci of failure. I've had friends stop me brainstorming the novels that I've worked on to go "...really, relax. It's okay to have a scene that only does one thing. You've got time. Just chill out and enjoy it". And I looked at the computer screen through which we were communicating like it had grown first, second, and third heads. It's a hard mindset to get into.

Series. Series. I admit, I resent series. I know so many people who want to write seven and more book series, and it boggles my mind in the same way that people on the other side, I imagine, look at me like I'm a lunatic when I say all the interesting parts of a story can be done in 1000 words or less. I can't imagine working on the same story for five, ten, fifteen years. I think I would break my teeth in frustration if I had to try to stall the development of characters and steer them away from epiphanies so that they would be recognizably the same person seven books down the road from where they started. I like to read a good fast paced trilogy, but even as a consumer I get annoyed when the situation doesn't seem to be advancing toward a resolution within 200 pages. Nevermind 1000. And that's without the problem that series' beginnings are likely to be already published and fixed in the reader's mind as you're writing the middle and ending parts, so you can't go back and add the foreshadowing for something huge you just thought of- no, if it's going in it has to go in as a giant, potentially shark-jumping ret-con (I'm looking at you, Mr. Martin). I have never read a series of four or more books that didn't feel in some ways padded, even in the type of series that are not a single linear narrative, but rather recurrent episodic works.

Then again, there's the strong point of series, and why I think we like reading them at all, and that's the real relationship that readers build with the characters. Enough so that you never want to let them go, even past the point where they should legitimately not be main characters anymore. I've done this. It's repeatedly ended in tragedy for me, but more than once I have picked up the next book in the series because I just could not say goodbye to a character I'd loved. Even when the stories were no longer my favorite, I'd hang in out of loyalty to the imaginary person at the center of it, because I knew them, and somewhere in the back of my mind I thought of us as friends.

Yeah, I get the appeal of that as a medium. The rest of it, though is intimidating as all hell.