Oof, 2018.

So many times this year, my wife and I looked at each other, reminiscing about something that happened to us, and said “was that really last week?”

I don’t know how a year can both feel like it’s whizzing by at 88 miles per hour, and be cramming in a month’s worth of events in every single week, but this one did.

So, to help me remember the sheer number of things that have happened this year, I’m going to set them all down. Well, as many as I can recall, anyway.

Writing

Since I started my new scoring system in February (which, again, thanks to Scott Sigler for sharing that with us at a Writers Coffeehouse), I’ve written 71,902 words.

Most of those were on the novel that I finished (finally!) in November. I did write one new short story, though, and edited four others.

I submitted just one story to three new markets, all of which rejected it.

Reading

Thanks to Goodreads' singularly bad UI, I have no idea how many books I read in 2018. It’s something north of 20, but that’s all I know.

Personal

I moved not once, but twice, in 2018. First move was from rental to rental, second was to the house we bought in July.

Neither one was easy, though the second put a bigger dent in our finances, not least because we had to completely redo the upstairs flooring and master bath in order to move in.

Here’s hoping there’s no more moves for me in the near future.

Oh, I also started an exercise routine (walking 3/week, yoga 2/week) and taking French lessons through Babbel. But I’m holding off counting those “for real” until I either drop a pant size or can read an Asterix comic in the original (preferably both).

Travel

I also traveled…a lot. Maybe more than I should have.

February was the JoCo Cruise, March was WonderCon, May was San Francisco (work), June was Downtown LA, July was the move (yeah, I’m counting it twice), October was Ireland (work), November was Boston and DC, December was Seattle (work again).

Tbh, I’m looking forward to January through March, if only because I know I’ll be sleeping in my own bed that whole time.

2019

So what lessons can I draw from these figures?

First, when writing a first draft, I need to be more aggressive with my weekly writing goal. It felt like I wrote a lot more than just 70K words this year, and that’s probably a function of how long I was working on the same piece. If I were to maintain the 2,500 words a week pace I had at the end of the year, I’d double my output next year.

Second, I need to submit more. There’s really no reason to let a story that’s complete and edited sit on the shelf. I need to get back into the habit of sending a story out again as soon as it gets rejected. No more dithering.

Third, I need to stop using Goodreads. There’s just no excuse for an interface that’s that bad. And I’m fortunate enough to know how to build my own replacement, so that’s what I should do.

Finally, I might need to actually travel less. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it interrupts my writing work, and given I’m also working a full-time job that requires a lot of my brain’s meager capacity, I can’t afford to lose that time. Unless I can find a way to keep writing, even while traveling, I need to cut down.

Picked this one up during my last trip through Boston. I’m inching closer and closer to forty, so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I’ve accomplished so far in my life (not much, really) and where I might want to go from here.

I’d hoped this book would help with that, or at least with countering any fears or anxieties I experience as I enter middle age.

Unfortunately, it’s a mostly disappointing book.

An Audience of One

Part of that is due to a flaw he admits right up front: it’s a book he wrote for himself. Someone who’s entered middle age as one of the professional classes, with a stable job, a stable home life, and good health. And not just any job, but the job he set out to get in his twenties. So he comes at middle age from the perspective of someone who’s already achieved the things they wanted out of life.

The book suffers for it. For how many of us set out to do one thing in our youth, only to end up somewhere entirely different? Or enter middle age with our bodies broken, or our minds? Do we have nothing to learn from philosophy?

Abandoning Reason

The second flaw follows directly from the first: he discusses arguments for dealing with certain aspects of middle age, such as the fear of death, but dismisses anything that doesn’t feel right for him. Abandoning reason, he moves from philosophy to pop psychology, deciding that what gives him the most comfort must be the best.

Never mind that what might comfort him would be appalling to someone else. Or that comfort might have little to do with the truth.

Paths Not Taken

And so he glosses over the insights embedded in the not-self dogma of Buddhism. Skips right over the most reasonable argument for not fearing death. And misses a gaping hole in the middle of his whole argument.

For embedded in the heart of his book is an assumption: that philosophy is meant to help us be happy.

But what if that isn’t the case? If we take philosophy as being the study of how to live a good life, does it necessarily follow that the good life is a happy one?

I don’t think so. At the very least, I don’t think it’s something we can assume. For while it is a modern trend to conflate happiness with virtue (or perhaps merely a particularly American one), there are plenty of examples from ancient philosophy where that isn’t the case. Consider Stoicism, where virtue can only be shown in the face of adversity.

Final Words

So while Midlife claims to be a mix of philosophy and self-help, it is neither. Not philosophy, because it leaves reason behind in the pursuit of comfortable aphorisms. And not self-help, because it was written to help only one person, the author.

Frustrating at its worst, disappointing at its best, I wouldn’t recommend this book.

I’ve spent the last week up in Seattle for a conference. It’s not my first time in the Pacific Northwest (I’ve been to Portland once or thrice) but it is my first time in the Emerald City.

Overall, I’ve had a good time, but there’s been some…bumps…along the way.

First Impressions

A young woman demanded I gave up my seat on the commuter rail in from the airport, not by asking, but by standing in the aisle, glaring at me, and then saying “Well?!”

Later, when I tried to get in an elevator that was about half full, the guy blocking the doorway just stared at me, and refused to let me by, even after I asked him if I could get in.

And I’ll not mention the number of cars that tried to run me over as I was crossing the street (at a crosswalk, with the light green).

This was all the first day. People I met later on (at the conference, when eating out, etc) were cool and friendly, but that first impression…lingers.

Architecture

Or this, which looks like someone framed out half a building and decided “eh, it’s good enough”:

I mean, I like ‘em, they’ve got a cool sci-fi vibe to them. But damned if I can explain ‘em.

Hills

You can see why I never had any trouble meeting my Apple Watch’s Move demands each day.

Weather

Not when I throw open the curtains in my hotel room, hoping for some morning sun, to find this:

I think I’ve seen the sun once all week. Suddenly I understand how grunge music came from this place.

MoPop

Housed in another building that looks like it just dropped in from a sci-fi movie lot, this place is amazing. I spent three hours there on Wednesday night, and it still wasn’t enough.

How could it be, when they’ve got original models used in filming Aliens:

And Gimli’s helmet:

And Shuri’s gloves:

They even did up the hall where the Doctor Strange props and costumes are exhibited in mirrors and glass, so it looks like you’ve stepped into the mirror dimension:

Wow.

Conclusions

But I’ll wait for the late spring, maybe summer, when I can actually, you know, see things.

When I finished the first draft of the latest novel two weeks ago, I told myself I could take the rest of the year off. Maybe do some editing of a few short stories, but no real work till the first of the year, when I planned to dive into editing the novel.

So, of course, I’m already outlining my next book.

It surprised me. For a good week there it felt weird to not be writing, but also rather good. I had more time to exercise, to study French, to simply read again.

But then I read Cicero, followed by Legion vs Phalanx, and that connected up with an idea for a YA novel I’ve had bouncing around in my head, and suddenly I’m writing down characters and plot points and trying to work this story into shape.

It’s like a damned addiction, this writing thing.

I’m not keeping score, though; not yet. I want time to think things over, to brainstorm and throw ideas away, before committing to daily, serious work.

For now, it’s time to play.

Masterful. Not only did I get a better sense of who Cicero was as a person, and why he was important, I also got a good feel for the politics of the late Roman Republic. More specifically, Everitt lays out the flaws inherent in the Roman system that – coupled with the stubborn refusal to change of most Senators – led to its downfall and the birth of the Empire.

I found this book easier going than Everitt’s biography of Augustus. They’re both good, don’t get me wrong, but I never felt lost in dates and events in Cicero, because Everitt constantly tied things back to the larger movements of the period. It gave me a better perspective, and also let me see how important Cicero really was.

For example, after watching the HBO series Rome (which is fantastic, highly recommend checking it out), I thought of Cicero as little more than a pompous windbag, unable to make up his mind or stand for anything.

On the contrary, while he could be long-winded, and tended to talk up his deeds too much, he was a capable administrator (he was only sent to govern provinces twice, but both times was very popular with the locals for being competent and incorruptible) and a rare thing in the late Republic: a Senator that sided with the wealthy (optimates) but wanted to change things just the same. Not to mention his original claim to fame as a great orator, which he won by ably defending clients in the courts.

He even, apparently, had some skill as an investigator. While on his second tour as a provincial governor, he uncovered a banking scandal that was being run by Marcus Brutus (the Brutus that later was one of Caesar’s assassins!).

In short: Highly recommended if you’re interested in Roman history, or even (like me) just curious to know more about the personalities glimpsed through series like Rome.

Another great coffeehouse! Since it’s December, we had a bit of a holiday pot-luck: people brought EggNog (spiked and not-spiked), cookies, candy canes, and wine. They also collected Toys for Tots, and even lit the first two candles of a menorah in honor of the first night (upcoming) of Hanukkah.

Lots of people had just wrapped up NaNoWriMo, so there was a lot of good news to go around. Biggest news was probably Henry Herz getting published in Highlights for Children, which is (apparently) a wickedly hard market to crack.

My notes are below. Congrats to Henry and all the NaNoWriMo winners! And, as always, many thanks to Mysterious Galaxy for hosting us, and Jonathan Maberry for running the Coffeehouse!

• the one golden rule: no writer bashing; like or dislike the twilight books or da vinci code, but they opened doors for thousands of other writers and injected billions into the books industry
• san diego writer's festival: april 13th, central library, similar folks to the festival of books
• option prices have dropped a lot since the recession; standard is now $5K, but can include lots of extras, like five-star treatment to get to set, executive producer credit (paycheck per episode), royalties per tv episode, etc
• remember that your agent is a business partner; don't be afraid to contact them, but don't think they're your best friends, they work for you, and you can learn a lot from them; agents love writers that are business savvy
• nov and dec used to be a bad time for agents, but since it's the slow season, it's a good time to submit to them; ditto pitches to editors of magazines for articles to write
• "we're looking for original stories, not original submission practices"
• when selling anthology to publisher, need a few big names on there so they feel that it'll definitely sell
• maberry: budgets 10 min out of every hour for social media; has a lot of pages and has to manage them, and manage his time on them
• henry herz: got article accepted into highlights magazine! very hard market to crack
• january coffeehouse will be about pitching; will also do sample panel
• on a panel: they're looking for a celebrity, need people to be a little larger-than-life; sometimes audience will ask questions they know the answers to, just to hear a celebrity say it
• being a panelist is a skill; you need to be a slightly different version of yourself that the public will accept as "writer"
• neil gaiman is naturally very awkward; had to hire an acting coach to script out appearances so people will get to see the "neil gaiman" they come to see
• pitching, being on a panel, these are all skills you need to practice, but they *are* skills you can develop and improve, even if you're a complete introvert
• exercise: pick your favorite novel (or movie), and pitch it as if you wrote it; something you know well enough to do without notes
• need to be good at it and comfortable with friends so that when in front of agents you aren't so scared and vulnerable
• people are more comfortable with peers than with people that put them on a pedestal
• recommends using donald maas' workbook on writing the breakout novel; the way it's intended is after a first draft is done, makes you drill deeper into the book
• also: don't revise until after you've waited a month and then also read the whole thing through again
• finally: do revising in waves; handle one change at a time, to make them manageable
• unsure whether to make book a mystery or fantasy? write the book you'd have the most fun writing; if unsure of audience, pick the one you'd have fun writing for and go all in

Recently finished reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.

It’s hard for me to talk about, because the book is filled with such piercing, clear-eyed insight, that if I tried to summarize it properly, I’d end up reproducing it.

I could say that I think the book should be required reading for any citizen of any country, in any age, because I do. And not because of any simplistic need to show that “Nazis are bad,” which (while true) doesn’t need an entire book to demonstrate. The testimony of even one concentration camp survivor should be enough for that.

I think everyone should read The Origins of Totalitarianism because it shows how the logic of totalitarian governments grows out of capitalism itself. Not that capitalism must always lead to totalitarianism, but that it always can. Just as racism and nationalism don’t always lead to a Final Solution, but without racism and nationalism, without some ideology claiming to override our humanity, a Final Solution is not even conceivable.

And yes, I think there are passages of the book, describing the methods of the Nazis and the communists (for Stalin’s government was also a totalitarian one) that are too close to our current administration for my comfort. I can’t read about the Nazis contempt for reality, or the way people in totalitarian movements will both believe the lies told by their leaders and praise them for their cleverness when the lies are revealed, without thinking of how right-wing nationalists in my own country treat the current President. But even if these things were not happening in the United States, it would be a book worth reading.

It is, in short, rightly called a classic. A long one, and a hard one, if we take its insights to heart as readers (passages calling out the middle classes for abandoning their civic duties for isolated home life strike close to home for me; I feel I’ve worked hard for what I have, and want to cling to it, but how many others am I leaving behind, by doing so?).

And yet it is that wondrous thing: a book hailed as a classic work, that is worth all the time and study we can give it. If you haven’t read it, please do.

We’re counting on you.

At 67,010 words, the novel’s done!

Been writing at a good clip while on vacation this week; almost 7,000 just since last Wednesday (!)

And of course, I already have a list of things I need to go back and fix. Characters that need to be combined. Personalities that need to be made consistent throughout the book. Even events that need to be reworked, because I changed my mind part-way through, so the latter consequences of the event doesn’t match the thing itself anymore.

But those can come later. For now, the first draft is done, and just in time for Turkey Day :)

Hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving (in the US), and a successful NaNoWriMo, if you’re participating!

Another week down: 2,295 words written!

Not all of those were for the novel, though. I’ve decided I want to try my hand at posting more here: more essays, more organized notes, etc. I know I won’t do it if it means taking time away from hitting my word count goals, so I’m making a change to the way I keep score: from now on, I’m counting words written for a blog essay as half.

So, for example, writing up a 900-word essay would count 450 words towards my weekly goal.

At the same time, I’m raising my weekly word count goal, to 2,500 words. I’ve been hitting the 2,250-word goal for eight weeks now. It’s time to stretch a bit further, and adding in essays to the word count should make 2,500 achievable. And even if I don’t write any essays in a week, it’s only 50 words extra per day.

Wish me luck!

I’ve come to resent having to carry my phone with me wherever I go.

It’s this large, bulky thing sitting in my front pocket that takes great pictures, it’s true, but most of the time just sits there, unused. I don’t even like to make calls with it anymore, the quality is so bad. If I want to read, or write, or watch a movie, I reach for my iPad.

So when Apple first announced the Watch, I was excited. Here was a chance to finally let it go, to be free of the phone.

And then they started describing the new Watch’s limitations. No cell service. No Siri without being near the phone. No text messaging without the phone. No…anything, really, without being near a phone.

Wasn’t till the Watch 3 that they made one that seemed to finally be an independent product. One that I could use to drop my phone habit.

But it was too bulky, the UI was too weird, and the watch interface itself wasn’t very responsive. I shelved the idea of getting one, and told myself to be patient.

That patience has finally paid off. Three weeks ago, I took the plunge, and bought a Series 4 Watch.

What Works

Fitness Tracking

It’s exactly what I wanted from a mobile workout device. Finally, I can slip out the door in the morning and head out, unencumbered by any keys (we have an electronic deadbolt) or phone, and yet I’m never out of touch (I bought the Watch with cell service), and I always know exactly how far I’ve got left to go in my workout.

I don’t have to guess if I’ve been out at least 30 min. I don’t have to speculate about how long my route is. I can change my route on the fly, and still get the right amount of exercise. I’ve even been able to do some interval training – 3 min on, 2 min off – thanks to being able to time myself with the Watch.

Phone Calls

I stopped taking calls on my phone. I just take them on my Watch, now, and no one seems to have noticed a difference.

Except me. Every time I take a call on my wrist, I feel like Batman.

Time-Keeping

You know, it’s just nice to be able to look at my wrist and know the date and time. No more fumbling to fish my phone out of my pocket.

Apple Pay

Holy crap, this works so well. If I know I’m going somewhere that takes Apple Pay, I don’t need my phone or my wallet. It’s surprisingly liberating, to have such empty pockets.

Texting with Handwriting

Took a little getting used to writing with my fingertip, but now I don’t hesitate to write out a response to a text. Nothing near as fast as typing on the iPad, mind you, but the handwriting recognition is pretty good, and improves over time. And again, it’s so much more convenient than having to pull out my phone.

What Doesn't Work

Siri

I know, I know, everyone likes to complain about Siri. But while the speech recognition seems better on the Watch than on my iPhone (which, huh?), it’s just so frustrating to have it fail to do some (to me) basic things.

For example, you can’t add a reminder to anything but the default list. So if, like me, you keep track of your Groceries as a separate reminders list, you can’t add to it with Siri. Which means you can’t add to it with the Watch.

Siri also can’t take notes. Nevermind that Apple’s own Notes app is pretty well integrated into all their other OSes. It’s not even present on the Watch, let alone something you can tell Siri to just “take a note real quick” for you.

Siri can set a timer for you, though. I mean, that’s 2018 for you: robots that can set timers for you via your voice. Well done, Apple.

Lyft/Uber

There’s no Lyft app. If you want to get a ride, you’re going to need your phone.

And the Uber app, while it exists, is broken. I made the mistake of going downtown without my phone, and had to have a friend call a Lyft for me to get home (like a barbarian!), because the Uber app insisted I needed to “setup a payment method” before I could use it (nevermind that I called an Uber to get down there, which presumably was paid for somehow).

So what seems like a natural fit for the watch (damn, I lost my phone somewhere, let me call a cab home) isn’t something Uber or Lyft cares about.

Final Judgement

I’m keeping the Watch. It’s still not perfect, but it is ideal for most of the things I need it for: tracking exercise, staying in touch when I’m away from my desk, and leaving my phone at home.

It’s still frustrating that I have to manage the Watch itself (settings, notifications, etc) with my phone. And it’s weird that Siri can lookup the location of a random city in Norway, but can’t add “Apples” to a grocery list. But these are quibbles, and fixable ones at that.

Now I just need to get one of those new Mac Minis so I can start writing my own Watch apps…

Still on target, if just barely: 2,256 words written last week.

I’ve reached the “ye gods, when will it be over” stage of writing this book. I know I’m close to the end, and I know basically where I’m going, but it feels like a slog to get there. Doesn’t help that I changed how to get to the ending a while back, adding another 10-20,000 words to the story.

Thanks, past me.

So I’m blowing things up. Shoving obstacles in front of my characters left and right. Tweaking personalities of minor characters to make them more interesting (with notes to go back and make them consistent later). In general, just merrily running a drill through the story until I get to the ending.

Who knows? Maybe all these changes will end up being cut. Or maybe I’ll end up twisting the rest of the story so they fit.

I’ll only know once it’s done.

Last week was my first week back to a regular writing schedule, after traveling in Ireland for almost two weeks.

I worried I wouldn’t be able to jump right in to writing at my previous pace, but I hit a writing streak on Friday, and blew past my writing goal: 2,400 words written!

And thank goodness, because next month I’ll have been working on the book for a year. I’m ready to finish it off, and move on to the next project. (Well, until I come back and edit this one).

Very much hoping to be done with it before the end of the year. Would be nice to head into the holidays with the work complete, and have earned a little break from the daily word mines.

The Problem

It’s too easy for someone with little or no experience to be elected. Requiring just an age and citizenship worked fine when the job was just the implementer of Congress’ will, but the role has expanded, and the requirements should expand with it.

It’s also too easy for a President to win office with a minority of the vote. For a position that is supposed to represent the direct choice of the voters, this is unbearable.

Proposed Solution

1. Abolish the Electoral College in favor of direct election
2. Require experience in Congress before being eligible to run for President

The Electoral College

To go one step further, I think we should require a President to win more than 50% of the vote in order to take office. If, after the initial ballot, no one has more than 50% of the vote, the top-two vote-getters should participate in a run-off election.

Congressional Experience

Notice that experience on the state level doesn’t count. And it shouldn’t: working at the federal level of government is a completely different thing. The responsibilities are greater. The choices are tougher. And the impact of the decisions made is wider.

In a parliamentary system, the kind of experience I’m advocating happens automatically. No one gets to be Prime Minister without first getting elected to the legislature, and then spending time writing national laws and seeing their impacts.

A presidential candidate with two terms of experience has a record, one that voters can use to evaluate how well they’d do the job. Did they compromise when they could in order to make progress? Did they object to everything and do nothing? Did they fulfill their promises? Did they promise too much?

And a President that’s worked in Congress knows its rules and methods. They’ll have allies (and enemies) in the legislature, people to work with in running the government. They’ll have seen laws they wrote interpreted by the courts. They’ll be more successful, in other words, because they’ll know how to get along with the other major branches.

Objections

True. But when we elect governors of states, we don’t worry about disenfranchising the smaller counties. It’s because the governor has to be in charge of the executive branch for the whole state, not just a portion of it.

Similarly, the President has to serve the country as a whole, not be tied to any one state or region. Thus giving any weight to the votes of one state versus another doesn’t make sense.

“Voters should decide if someone is qualified. Anything else is undemocratic.”

This one I struggle with. Certainly I don’t want to go back to the days of deals made in smoke-filled rooms, with the will of the populace a small consideration, if any. And I don’t want to give the individual political parties more control over who runs and who doesn’t.

But I think in terms of goals. What is the goal of representative democracy? Is it to reduce our reps to mere pass-through entities, automatically doing whatever the majority says to do?

I don’t think so. I think there’s no point in having representatives, if those representatives aren’t supposed to use their judgement. Think of the rep that constantly updates their opinions based on the latest poll, and how we view them with contempt. Rightly so, in my view; if they don’t stand for anything except the exercise of power, they don’t deserve to wield it.

And I think republics aren’t born in a vaccum; we didn’t all come together (all 350 million of us) and decide to create a federal system with elected representatives. Instead, a republic is a compromise between the powerful and the people. We give our consent to their use of power, so long as that power is constrained by both law and elections.

In that sense, the most democratic thing is for us to set constraints on who among the powerful can run for office. We, the people, want the best candidates, not just the best speakers or the richest or the ones with the most fervent supporters. Leaving the field wide open puts us at the mercy of demogogues. Narrowing the scope of possible candidates puts constraints on their power, not on ours. We still have the final say, on Election Day.

Conclusion

But they will give us better candidates for the Presidency. And they will ensure no one holds that office that doesn’t command the consent of a majority of voters.

Those two changes will make other changes easier. Better candidates will mean better Presidents, and better Presidents will mean better government.

And that’s something we can all, right and left alike, agree we need.

Ever read a book that makes you feel both better and worse about the times you live in?

That’s what Fantasyland did for me.

Better, because Andersen shows how the current fad for conspiracy theories and disregard for facts (on the conservative side of politics, this time) is just the latest iteration of a series of such fads, going all the way back to the first Northern European settlers of the Americas.

For example: the first colonists in Virginia were lured by rumors of gold that had been completely made up by speculators. They starved and died while hunting for gold and silver, until by chance they started cultivating America’s first addictive drug export, tobacco.

But I also feel worse, in that it makes me think there’s no real escape from the fanaticism and illusions that lie in the heart of the American experiment. They’ve allowed the burning of witches, the enslavement of entire nations, and the genocide of those who were here first. And now they’re pushing even my own family to condone the caging of immigrant children, the silencing of women, and the persecution of Muslims.

It’s disheartening, to say the least.

I take hope in the other side of the cycle that Andersen exposes. When reason pushes back against mysticism, and we re-fight the battles of the Enlightenment. We banned snake-oil and established the FDA. We drove quacks underground and wrote licensing laws. We won the Civil War. We passed Civil Rights legislation.

Granted, Andersen himself doesn’t seem to think there’s light at the end of our present tunnel. At the end of the book, he falls into what I think is a trap: believing the United States to be completely unique, and the current era to be uniquely terrible.

I think the first is countered with any glance at the news from the rest of the world. From Brexit to the rise of the populist right in Poland and Hungary, to Venezuala’s deluded leadership and China’s reality-scrubbed media, there’s plenty of other countries with their own fantasylands. While we in the U.S. often tell ourselves we’re not like anyone else, it turns out we are.

And I think his own book is a firm counter to the second trap. Every era thinks itself both the pinnacle of human achievement and the lowest depth to which humanity can fall. But pushing back against unreason – by refusing to give them a platform, by taking their threat seriously but not their claims, by not falling for the trap of treating every belief as equally valid – has worked in the past. It can work now.

Scraped by this week’s word goal: 2,258 words.

The next week or two are going to be spotty, writing-wise. I’ll be in Ireland starting Thursday, partly for work and partly for fun, so between prepping for the trip and going on the trip and then recovering from the trip, there might not be much time for writing.

I will have a rather long plane-ride there (and one on the return), so I’ll try to get what I can done then. Other than that, my schedule will probably be so screwy I won’t be able to carve out any regular writing time.

I’m going to give myself a pass on this time, though. I’ve been working on the book almost a year now; hobbling along for a week or two while I’m traveling seems like a small delay, in the scheme of things.

Wrote 2,404 words last week! That makes three weeks in a row I’ve managed to hit my new, higher target.

And I hit another milestone, as well: the novel passed 50,000 words!

I worried several times that maybe I didn’t have enough “story” there to hit 50K, and make it a proper novel. But I’m already there, and I haven’t yet hit the climax.

I should top out at around 60K, which’d be a nice size for trimming later on. A short novel, true, but a novel nevertheless.

Onward!

2,306 words written this week!

I’m trying to let go a little more this week. As in, stop worrying so much about what would be realistic and worry more about what’d be interesting. To approach the new scenes and descriptions thinking “what would be cool?” rather than “what would be expected?”

Again, I don’t know if this approach will make the book any better. No way to tell until it’s done. But it is making it both more challenging (I have to think things through a bit more) and more fun (anything goes! so long as I can describe whatever it is).

I’m heading into the final stretch of the novel, so I’m giving myself more liberty to experiment. Since I know where I’m going now, and who’s taking me there, I guess I feel more free to play around.

I’ll probably just end up making more problems for myself down the line, but for now, I’m just enjoying flexing my wings a little bit.

I did it! Hit the new word count goal: 2,285 words written last week!

Again, I wrote most of them on the weekend. Mornings last week were consumed with vacation planning, as the trip we’re taking to Ireland in October is coming up fast. Had to get everything booked before it sells out, so that took priority over my writing during the week.

But I still got it done!

Pushing closer to the climax. Even this close to being done, though, I’m still finding things that I wrote earlier that I’ll need to change.

For example, while writing one scene, I realized the character I’d planned to have in it to do a certain thing couldn’t be there, because he wouldn’t do that thing; it just wouldn’t make sense for his character. So I had to change the scene mid-stream, as it were, and finish it out with a different character in mind (and even a different action, so the plot’s changing, too).

I suppose I should expect this by now, though. The book isn’t going to be right the first time, and I’m going to have to go back over it multiple times until it is right. I suppose I should be grateful I’m able to see any mistakes now, instead of having to wait for them to be pointed out to me by beta readers later (though I’m sure they’ll find more when they go through it).

So I’m keeping the higher weekly word count for now. Not sure what I’ll do when it comes time for the Ireland trip. Either take some time off, or maybe, just maybe, I’ll be done before then?

2,050 words written this week!

That’s five weeks in a row of hitting my goal of 2,000 words. I’m consistently churning out 400 - 500 words a day, 5 days a week.

Hard to believe I was having trouble with just 250 words a day only a few months back.

So it’s time to up my goal once again. I’m targeting 2,250 words this week. Just an extra 50 words a day, but it’ll get me to the end of this first draft that much faster.

Speaking of which, I’m closing in on the tentpole event that will set off the last act of the book. I got the idea from Jim Butcher’s excellent post on how to handle the mushy middle, and it’s really helped me focus on something other than the climax to keep the book on track.

I’m also trying to embrace Peter Clines' advice to accept that the first draft will suck. It’s still hard for me to turn off me inner editor, but I’m trying to give myself more freedom to play in this draft.

If I’ll have to go back and fix it anyway, why not have some fun with it first?

Wrote 2,023 words this week!

This means I not only met my goal, but the book’s crossed over 40K words!

It’s an arbitrary number, but since I’m estimating the final count’s going to be somewhere between 50K and 60K, it feels like I’m in the home stretch.

Of course, I keep noticing mistakes I’ve made, earlier in the draft. This week I realized I’d gotten the geometry of the setting completely wrong. I’ll need to do an editing pass (once this draft is done) just to fix the blocking, movement, and descriptions of the place.

But I’m sticking to the advice I got from the Writers' Coffeehouse: to keep writing as if I’ve fixed the issues, and just keep notes for what I should rewrite later. It’s helped me keep moving forward, and kept me from getting discouraged.

Among the many feelings I have about American politics recently, a recurring one is disappointment.

I’m disappointed that so many who call themselves conservatives have thrown their principles away for a tribal loyalty. Disappointed because when the people on the other side of the issue abandon their own logic, there’s no debate you can have with them anymore.

You can’t find common ground, if the other side doesn’t have any ground to stand on.

So I’ve been thinking about what a principled conservative would have to say about the issues of our day: health care, abortion, etc. What arguments would they make, if they chose ideals over loyalty?

The Roots of Conservatism

Arguing against the intellectual inheritors of the French Revolution – everything from the Independence movements of the Americas (North, South, and Central) to the Bolsheviks in Russia – is how the conservative movement defined itself over the next two hundred years.

At the center of their stance was a belief that people cannot be improved through government action. It was deliberately set against the utopias of socialism and communism, which held (among many other things) that you could get an inherently peaceful and conflict-free society if you but organized it differently.

You can see echoes of this in the Western science fiction writing of the mid–20th Century, which often portrayed dystopias as societies that regulated the thoughts and beliefs of their members “for the greater good”, whether through government fiat (1984, Farenheit 451) or chemistry (Brave New World).

Coupled with this was a conviction that the People did not have a right to revolution. Government had a responsibility to use its power in the pursuit of justice, but if a government was unjust, its citizens had no right to take up arms and overthrow it. They did not have to suffer in silence, but they did have to suffer.

American Conservatives found this second principle more problematic, since their own government was formed via revolution. The compromise they came up with was two-fold:

1. People do not have the right to overthrow a democratically elected government
2. Workers do not have the right to overthrow their employers

20th-Century American Conservatism

Anti-communist, because communists wanted to build better people via overthrowing business power and regulating personal beliefs.

Pro-nuclear-family, because socialists, anarchists, and others wanted to break the nuclear family as a social experiment (again in the pursuit of better people).

Anti-regulation, because government has no more business trying to make better corporations than it does better people.

Consequences

And they stand against similar liberation movements today. They pass laws regulating who can use which bathroom, or restricting a woman’s access to a safe abortion, or surpressing votes that might go to their opponents.

And they keep losing these fights. Fights they should lose. Fights they need to lose.

But instead of re-examining the choices that led them to take on these losing fights, American convervatives have instead double-down on them. Anyone on their side on these fights is an ally, and anyone not on their side is an enemy.

This tribal – not conservative – way of thinking it’s what’s led the Republican Party to choose a twice-divorced sexual predator as its standard bearer for a “moral” society.

They’ve forgotten their roots. You can’t make better people, remember?

A New Conservatism

Gay marriage would be legal. Homosexual families means more nuclear families, which conservatives believe are the best way to raise children. Adoption by same-sex couples would be not only legal, it’d be encouraged.

Laws restricting abortion would be lifted. First, because banning it is wielding government power in an attempt to make people “better”, which is anathema to a conservative. Second, because women without access to safe abortions get unsafe ones, which can damage their chances of having children later, which means fewer families, which is bad for a conservative.

Gun ownership by private citizens would be highly regulated. The private ownership of anything more than a hunting rifle can only be meant for either a) murder, or b) overthrowing the lawfully elected government. Neither of those are things a conservative could endorse. For sporting enthusiasts, gun ranges might be legal, but licensed and monitored like any dangerous public service.

Maternity and paternity leave would be paid for by the government, and mandatory. Parents should be encouraged to have children, and to bond with them. That leads to stronger families, which conservatives want.

Health care would be universal and free. Making businesses pick up the tab is an unfair burden on them, and suppresses the ability of all businesses – large and small – to hire. Providing free pre- and post-natal care for mothers encourages having children, as does paying for a child’s health care. And covering health care for working men and women means a) they’re healthier, and so can work more, and b) reduces the financial strain on families in case of accidents, which will help them stay together.

Future Arguments

We’d argue over the proper way to regulate business, if at all.

We’d argue over military spending.

We’d argue over foreign policy (which I haven’t touched on here).

In short, we’d have a lot to talk about. Without tribal loyalities, we could actually debate these things, secure in the knowledge that we disagreed on principle, not on facts.

Blew past the word count goal this week: 2,133 words written!

I realized yesterday that I’m almost at 40,000 words. Since I expect this novel to be brief (about 50K or so), at my current pace I’ll be done in about five weeks.

Five weeks!

Who knows if I’ll actually be finished at 50K, but it’s exciting to think about putting this first draft to rest. Feels like I’ve been working on this novel forever. It’s only been nine months, though, and it’ll be close to a year before I’m done.

Ok, not done exactly, but at least done with the first draft of it.

I’d like to get into a pace where I can finish (as in, draft, revise, stick a fork in it, ship it finished) a novel a year. I’m not quite there yet; if I finish this one by October, I’d only have a month to do all the edits it needs, which likely won’t be enough time.

It’d be better if I could revise one book while writing another. I haven’t been able to master that trick yet; the one book takes up so much head space for me that it’s all I can do to occasionally spit out a short story or two while I’m in the middle of the draft.

Maybe I could find a way to edit on weekends, and work on the new draft during the week? Or vice-versa?

Not sure what’s best. I just know once this draft is done I’ll have four novels that are finished drafts, but not finished pieces. And that’s starting to bug me. I need to be sending these out, trying to land an agent. But that’s hard to do when they’re not in any shape I want a professional to see them in.

Do you revise one book while writing another? How do you do it?

Hit the new goal again this week: 2,016 words written.

Wrote almost 900 of those in a single day: Saturday. Not great to be writing on a weekend, I suppose, but better than having to write both days.

I’ve noticed I seem to need two days off writing, no matter what. Whether that’s Saturday and Sunday, or Monday and Tuesday, there’s always a gap somewhere in the week where I have to accept I won’t get any writing done.

I’m also apparently fairly sensitive to work stress when writing. If the week starts out hard, I’m likely as not going to be playing catch up on my writing over the weekend. Stress at work seems to soak up all the free space in my head, making me feel like I can’t think about anything else.

Not sure if that’s an unhealthy reaction or not. From one perspective: shouldn’t my writing be an escape from what’s going on around me? From another: how can I possibly devote energy and time to being creative when I’m worried about my livelihood?

So: I didn’t make it to this month’s Writers Coffeehouse. Missed seeing everyone, and checking in on how their own writing is going.

But I did hit my new writing goal: 2,033 words this week!

Granted, I wrote most of them on the weekend, writing ~600 words each on Saturday and Sunday. But I tell myself that what matters is that the draft gets written, not when it happens. Progress is progress.

For the novel itself, I seem to have turned a corner in the writing. I’m framing each scene now as a contest between two more characters, and letting the thing spill out from them battling it out (not always with fists).

I don’t know if the writing is better necessarily (this is a first draft, after all), but it’s easier, which means I can relax a bit and have more fun with it.

I also keep getting ideas on how to improve the first novel I wrote, years ago. Once this draft is done, I might have to go back and re-work that older book, just to scratch that itch.

Managed to write 1,784 words last week. I thought I’d get more done, with my wife out of town, and all those empty nights ahead of me, waiting to be filled with words.

But it turned out that with the construction still going on in our house, at the end of the work day I felt like nothing more than curling up on the couch with the pups and binging the last season of Portlandia.

Thankfully my wife’s coming home Tuesday (yay!) and with her here I should be able to get back to a regular writing schedule.

I also noticed I’ve hit my word goal for 6 weeks running now. Time to up the count again.

So I’ve upped it another page, to 2,000 words per week. That means I need to write 400 words a day during the week to hit the goal. Either that, or play catch-up every weekend, which…no thanks. I’d rather have my weekends free :)

We’ll see how it goes. I’ve still got that penalty hanging over me if I don’t make it, to push me along when I slow down. I haven’t had to face it yet; I hope I never do.

Intense.

The prose is stripped clean of excess, going down so smooth it injects the story right into your bloodstream. And hot damn, it’s a good one.

I haven’t read a lot of YA, but this is the first one I enjoyed, start to finish.

Three things I learned about writing:

• First-person, step-by-step, can be brutal: by sitting right inside the character’s head, it’s easy to get sucked in, and then when the shit goes down, you feel every victory and defeat like they’re happening to you.
• Every group has a jerk. Every group in fiction needs a jerk.
• One way to handle writing a large group, where each person needs their own personality, is to write scenes in which the group rotates through different configurations. The numbers stay manageable, but the composition of the group in the scene changes, giving each member a chance to shine.

1,761 words written this week.

Whew.

Really glad I went to the Writers Coffeehouse last Sunday. Between the holiday, my wife and I closing on our new house (!), and the struggles I was having with the current novel, I might not have gotten anything done this week. But the group gave me a great solution to my problem (to keep writing as if I’d made the changes to earlier scenes that I’m planning, but without stopping to make those changes right now), and inspired me to keep pushing through.

I feel a little freer to experiment with this draft, now. Like I can try something out to make things more interesting or dramatic, without worrying that it matches up exactly to what came before. I know it’ll create a mess of a draft for me to clean up in later edits, but at least I’ll finish it. Easier to see the shape of the story once I’ve written it.

Made it back to the Writer’s Coffeehouse this month. It was a smaller crowd than usual, but that just meant we had more time to go in-depth on everyone’s questions :)

My notes are below. Many thanks to Mysterious Galaxy for the space, and to Henry Herz for hosting!

• publishers and writers of san diego: meet once a month in carlsbad about the business of self-publishing
• henry: doing a triple-launch in october at mysterious galaxy
• orange county children's book festival is in october
• san diego union tribune book festival is in august
• san diego state univ writers conference is in january 2019
• la jolla writers conference is in november
• snowflake pro: really good software for building a book pitch
• question: seeing problems with story in current first draft; go back and fixit now? or keep writing as-is?
  • answer: write it as if it's fixed, but keep going; leave notes to go back and fix the earlier bits in later drafts
• new market: future-sf.com
• bootstrapping social media?
  • henry: when he was getting started, interviewed successful authors and posted them on his blog
  • whatever you do, try to find something that relates to writing and do that
• a way to kick-start the conversation on social media: ask people for recommendations (taco places, procedural movies, etc)

Made the new word-count goal for a second week, thank the gods: 2,478 words.

Again, most of those are short-story edits. I basically didn’t touch the current novel this week, which has turned out to be a good thing. I’ve had time to think through some of the problem areas, plot threads that weren’t quite matching up. When I do go back to working on that draft, I’ll have some revisions to make that’ll strengthen the story before I finish.

In the meantime, I’ve submitted one of the stories I revised last week. I’ve also got two more stories ready to submit after this week’s work, for a total of five.

Here’s hoping they all find good homes.

First week of the new word-count target. Final score? 2,698 words (!)

I feel ambiguous about that number, though.

I should be very proud of myself. But most of those words aren’t new ones written towards the current novel, they’re revisions of old ones during editing. Specifically, three different short stories. Even giving myself 1/6th credit for each word, I went through enough of them to blow through my word-count goal.

So I feel like I cheated, in a sense. And yet, I do now have three short stories that I feel are ready to submit, which is something I didn’t have at the start of the week. Maybe that’s enough to be proud of?

It might also be that these stories were close enough to submittable already (I’d gone through five drafts of one of them) that the editing process felt easier than it could have.

Next week I’ll be editing one more short story, with the same goal: polish it up for submission. That’ll give me four stories to send out, in the hopes that one of them finds a home.

Then it’ll be back to pushing on the current novel.

Hit my word count again this week. This makes 12 weeks in a row. 12 weeks where I’ve written 1,500 words, whether I was at home, or on vacation, or sick, or hungover, or working overtime.

It’s time to up the ante.

I’m going up a page, and setting next week’s goal at 1,750 words.

It looks like a small raise, but it feels like a stretch. There’s been several weeks where I cleared 1,500 words by just a single word or two. Weeks where I had to write Saturday and Sunday to make my count.

But I’d like to do more. I’d like to start sending short stories out again. That means taking time to edit them, and upping my word count is one way to force me to do that.

I’ve also got three novels in draft form that I need to revise. If I’m going to clear that backlog, I’m going to have to knuckle down and start plowing through it.

So wish me luck! Or better yet, wish me energy and willpower. I’m going to need all three :)

It’s Memorial Day here in the US, which means it’s supposed to be a day for us to remember and honor those who have fallen in the armed forces.

Both sides of my family have a tradition of serving in the military. My brother’s a Marine. So is my nephew. My uncle-in-law damaged his hearing while manning artillery in World War II. Several of my cousins have been in the Army, the Marines, the Air Force.

Thankfully, they’ve all come home. But that’s not true for every family, or even most families.

To me, the best way to honor those who have fallen is to treat our current veterans' lives with respect. That means never going to war under false pretenses. It means choosing our allies carefully, so that we don’t need to hesitate about defending them when they are under attack. It means never rushing to war, and keeping our diplomatic corps as strong as our military, so we always have options.

Too often, I feel our leaders – of all political stripes – have failed to do this. It’s as if each one of them secretly wants another World War II, a “just” war they can use to drape themselves in glory. But that’s how we got Vietnam: a (Democratic) President lying to Congress and the American people about a war we didn’t need to fight. The Second Iraq War was more of the same, only under a Republican this time.

I understand foreign policy is not black-and-white. It’s a complicated, shifting thing, where today’s ally could be tomorrow’s foe. But we should never go to war without knowing why. We should never hurry to wage war when we don’t have to.

It’s the least our leaders can do for us, we who have to fight and die, we who have to wait and worry and pray for our brothers and sisters and wives and fathers to come home.

If you’ve lost family in war, my heart goes out to you. May you find some comfort this Memorial Day, and in all the days to come.

Haven’t posted in a bit. We’ve been ramping up the search for a house this month, and between looking and inspecting and filling out paperwork, I haven’t had much room in my head for anything else.

I have kept up my writing, though. Having that deadline hanging over my head, and the punishment that would come with missing it, has pushed me to get things done. I’ve just made my word count every week, even if that meant writing half of them on Saturday in a mad rush to keep from missing the target.

Most of those words have been for the novel, though I’ve not dropped the short story. After getting some harsh (but accurate) feedback from a beta reader, I realized it needed a full rewrite. That’s almost complete, and I think the new version is much stronger. There may even be a novel lurking in there, in the background of that world.

Thankfully, that novel’s not too distracting…yet. What has been distracting is how my ideas for how best to write the novel keep changing, right in the middle of this first draft. I’m now curious to try my hand at writing more from a third-person omniscient point of view, which would be a complete change from the novel’s current POV. I’m also re-thinking character histories and motivations, which would be an abrupt change this far through.

I’m telling myself to write these ideas down, and come back to them later. Get the first draft done, get the story out there, and then use these ideas during the editing process, if they’re needed. Otherwise, I worry that if I keep changing course, I’ll never finish the book.

Another solid Coffeehouse. Scott Sigler returned for hosting duties, and he ran a tight ship, taking us from topic to topic while still giving everyone a chance to speak up.

Last hour or so of the Coffeehouse was just rapid-fire “what are your current issues?” questions for Scott, which he handled with honesty and poise.

Got some really good advice out of this one. Here are my notes:

invizium.com: writer trying to break into book trailers

J Dianne Dotson: BOOK OUT MAY 29th; worldwide distribution via ingram spark; book trailer is up; signing at Mysterious Galaxy in june

art vs business: are we artists or business people?

• think in terms of ratings: numbers that are too small for big pubs are great for smaller ones
• don't chase trends
• if you do what you like, consistently, you can find your audience

check twitter, #mswl, manuscript wish list, agents and editors tweet what they’re looking for

when is it ok to promote? don’t be afraid to ask, but be polite

polite persistence is the cornerstone of becoming a published author with a publishing house

how to follow up with editor or agent you meet in person? wait a week, email them, say how you met and what you talked about, short pitch, then wait a month and email again, repeat till you hear back

editing aids? dianne really likes the hemingway app, can just put your text in there and it’ll catch sentences that are too long, stuff like that, and it’s free; best to do scene by scene, look for trends you didn’t know were there

self pubbing is now the minor leagues; if you sell 5,000 or 10,000 copies, your next query letter is much much stronger

don’t wait; if you’ve written a book and no one wants to pick it up, self-publish it and move on to the next book

for your website, social media: pick your writing name, and grab that domain now, use it everywhere

also: grab every free email account with that handle, so no one else can

scott recommends the book “save the cat”, it’s about screenwriting, but has a few chapters about pitching that applies just as well to books

don’t shut down social media as political statement; just go fallow; online real estate is just as valuable as physical real estate

beta-readers: can be good for picking up basic reader questions (plot holes, likable characters, etc), but beware when they start commenting on your style

suggestion: test out beta readers with one chapter, before sending them the whole book

you all have your own writing style, you just have to get better at it

aln: local writer’s meetup group; totally free, they pick a subject out of a hat, 30 min writing, then critique

scott’s advice: if you’re in a slump, go write some fan fiction, get the brain turning and then come back

one writer recommends: rachel arron: 2k to 10k, she rereads that book whenever she gets into a slump, good advice on structure, etc

aon timeline syncs with scrivener now; can use it as timeline app and push to scrivener

scott color-codes the index cards for scenes in scrivener by pov character, lets him easily see who needs a scene

other writer: pantser, she writes an outline after the fact, uses it to guide her second draft

if you put up trailers on youtube, watch their viewing stats to see where people fall off watching to learn what to do better on the next one

try to keep trailer to 30 seconds, minute at the most

Another blow out week! Wrote 2,519 words (whew!).

Most of them were for the new novel, but, like last week, one of the writing exercises I did turned into a short story I’m going to polish and try to sell. I also did a second draft of the short story from last week, which even though it only counted for half, still added ~400 words to my total.

I didn’t think I could work on multiple pieces at once, but so far it’s not been an issue. If anything, I find I come to the novel work with a more playful attitude, a willingness to experiment, that I didn’t have before. I don’t know if that’s translating into better writing, but I’m enjoying it more, so that’s something :)

If I can sustain this pace, and I hope I can, I’ll need to up my weekly goal again. I don’t think I’ll leap all the way up to 2,000 words, though. Going up to 1,750 should be fine.

But let’s see if I can keep up this pace for another week, first.

Blew through my writing goal this week: 2,431 words written.

Not all of them were for the new novel, though. I’ve been working my way through Ursula K LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, which has a set of writing exercises for each chapter. Yesterday’s exercise was supposed to be a 200-word snippet to play with different points of view. I was having so much fun writing it, though, that it’s become an 800-word (very) short story. I’m going to polish it up, and try to sell it. So I decided to count it in this week’s word count.

Novel itself has crept up to 16,000 words. I took some time earlier in the week to do some more outlining, which has helped, and also read Jim Butcher’s great piece on Writing the Middle, which was fantastic. It made me realize I was working toward his “Big Middle” technique, so I’ve decided to embrace it, and write with that in mind.

I also have to give thanks to the writers at the San Diego Writers Coffeehouse. Seeing everyone on Sunday recharged my batteries, and made me feel that I could finish what I’ve started. I’m not alone, and that’s a very, very, very good thing.

Paul Ryan’s only just announced his retirement from Congress, and already people in the media are writing hagiographies to how “different” his brand of Republicanism was from Trump’s.

Don’t fall for it.

These same people wrote the same hagiographies about Bush when Trump won the election. They wrote the same lies about Reagan when Bush was in office. I’m certain they’ve got similar paeons to Nixon, they just can’t get them published.

Let me be clear: the Republican Party has been a party of right-wing nationalists and bullies my entire life.

Reagan’s rise was a dramatic split with the centrist GOP of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. His faction dropped support for the Equal Rights Amendment from the national party’s platform, and embraced the pro-corporate economics (deregulation, tax cuts) that until then sat on the fringes of the party. Once in office, Reagan caused a massive recession, presided over the biggest bank scandal in our history (until W outdid him), and repeatedly lied to Congress about our military engagements. Not to mention his neglect of anything resembling the public health, like the AIDS epidemic, inner city blight, or the rise of crack cocaine. All the while, he bragged about family values and restoring our nation’s confidence.

Sound familiar?

When Bush II was elected, he followed a similar pattern: tax cuts leading to massive deficits and recession, along with misbegotten foreign wars built on lies and sustained via misinformation. And to rally the troops at home? Talk of an “axis of evil”, of the perils of Muslims, and of a restoration of morality to the White House. But nothing about the soaring cost of home ownership, or the stagnant wages of the American worker, or the struggle for single working mothers to find affordable child care.

Trump is just more of the same, but this time with the mask ripped off. Instead of talking of a clash of civilizations, he talks about “shithole countries.” Instead of dancing around a woman’s right to equal pay and equal dignity with talk of “traditional family values,” he brags about the sexual assaults he’s gotten away with. And going beyond talk of tax cuts helping the economy, he flat-out tells us that tax-dodging is “smart.”

So don’t fall for anyone who tries to contrast Trump with some golden era of Republican civility. For the last forty years, that party has been a coalition of radicals hell-bent to undo the progress made during the New Deal. Their policies have bankrupted our government and crippled our ability to respond to the domestic and foreign challenges we face today.

They are not conservatives. They’re radicals. And they’ve been that way for a long time.

Another great coffeehouse! Jonathan Maberry was back for hosting duties, and kicked off two lively discussions on some recent controversies in the publishing world.

Thanks again to Mysterious Galaxy for giving us the space to meet, and to Jonathan, Henry, and the other organizers!

My Notes:

henry: finds trello is a great visual way to outline a novel, can use columns for chapters, drill in for details, etc

jonathan: no one can know everything, we all need to share so together we can find solutions to our problems

free files with sample query letters, etc are up on jonathan’s website! ready for download

discussion: diversity pushes for anthologies - what’s the right approach?

discussion: can you separate the writer from the writing? ex: lovecraft

sd writers and editors guild: henry giving talk there later this month

ralan.com: maberry’s favorite website to find markets for short stories; anthologies, etc

what’s reasonable for a developmental editor to charge?

⁃ depends on hourly or per word

⁃ seen $500 to $5,000

⁃ inexpensive but professional: $0.004 per word, developmental edit

⁃ $2,000 for 90,000-word novel: about the average for developmental and line by line

developmental vs line editor: development is high-level, looking at plot and characters, shape of the story; line editor is going line by line before final print

jim butcher has a great piece online about writing the middle

jonathan: we dismiss nonfiction writing, especially in the magazine market, but we shouldn’t; there’s always knowledge we have that other people don’t posses; even basics can be good articles, because most magazines on a topic are read by nonexperts; what sells currently in magazine context is a conversational style; pro rates: $2-$7 a word; magazines starting to be hungry again

breaking in? don’t have to be a writer to sell it, have to know the subject matter; one of his students sold an article on falling (ex: how to fall from a skateboard) to multiple markets, used it to help him work through college

write first? or pitch? jonathan: never write before you sell

everyone here has something they’re an expert in, that they probably don’t value because it’s old hat to them; “i’m just a secretary” phenomenon

basics are great: how to find a good divorce lawyer (or a web developer, sysadmin, etc)

jonathan: write an outline, pitch to multiple magazines at once (120), if make multiple sales, write different versions of the article for each magazine; get back issues, read online content to learn voice and approach; don’t have to do it that way, but even if going one at a time, be ready with their next market if get rejected

pay on publication? NOPE, always go for pay on acceptance

Scraped by my word goal this week: 1,554 words, most of which were written in just two days (yesterday and today).

Had a hard time getting myself to write each day, and didn’t make it most days. I think it’s because I’m closing out the early chapters of the book, where I had things mapped out pretty well in advance. From here, I can see the ending I want to get to – the various plotlines I want to wrap up, the character arcs I need to complete – but I’m not sure how to get there. Large chunks of my current outline are just scene titles with TBD for description.

I need to spend some time outlining, getting the next steps mapped out. But I also need to keep pushing out my word count every day. I’m not sure how to reconcile that, other than to maybe take one day next week and just spend my writing time outlining, then catch up on the other days of the week.

We’ll see.

Whew. Managed to scrape by my goal this week: 1,511 words.

Definitely not raising my weekly word count for a while.

It’s still helpful, though. Even when I’m taking time off from the day job, I make sure to sit down and get my daily word count out. Don’t want to be playing catch-up on the weekends :)

Might shift my reward a bit this week. Instead of getting an album, I’m thinking of picking up a game. Discovered they ported Heroes of Might and Magic III (one of my favorite games from college, and now I’m dating myself) to iOS, and I’d like to check it out.

Till next week: good luck with your own writing! May we see each other on the shelves someday :)

Spent most of my second day at WonderCon in the Writers Coffeehouse. Caught a few writing panels after.

Notes below!

Writers Coffeehouse

• hosted by the writer Peter Clines
• rule one: there’s always exceptions
• five myths about publishing
• • all traditional publishers are doomed: nope, 2013 was the best year ever for penguin publishing, gave everyone a $5,000 christmas bonus; trad pubs have been around for centuries and aren’t going away
  • trad pubs will not work with new authors: nope, people go straight to big five publishers all the time; there are big pubs that don’t require an agent (for example, tor)
  • trad publishers are going to make you change your book: out of 200 writers he knows (to varying degrees), has only heard of one author forced to change, and that’s because they picked up his book as part of five book set and they didn’t really want it; you’ll always get notes from the editor sure but that’s part of their job and a lot of it is right, and you don’t have to take them
  • trad publishers will take all your money and never give anything: uh, nope, the advance they pay you is yours, even if it doesn’t earn out; and nothing in return? nope, they give you a story editor, a copyeditor, interior layouts, designer, cover designer, publicist (yes, for every book), even have a regional bookseller whose job is to sell books to bookstores; that’s six people you get working on your book that you’d have to hire yourself
  • trad publishers will make you give the advance back if it doesn’t sell: oh so ridiculously untrue; no one has to give it back for the book underselling; they do ask for it back for breach of contract, like the book isn’t done two years past it’s due date, or they signed a contract for four books but only wrote three
• self-publishing myths
• • self-pub is faster and easier than trad pub: sort of true, in that you can go home tonight and push a book out, but that’s a quick way to produce crap; if you want to produce a good product, you basically have to take on all the jobs of a publisher yourself, which takes time away from your writing
  • self-pub means more money to the writer: self pubbing is sort of like opening your own restaurant vs being a chef in someone else’s restaurant; you can do what you want but you’re on the hook for all the expenses as well, probably have to shell out for someone else to do a lot of the work that you can’t do yourself; get a bigger cut of the pie but it’s a smaller pie from fewer sales
  • there’s a stigma to be self-published: this used to be true, but epublishing has changed everything, agents and editors alike are reading self-pub books looking for new stuff; clines’ agent has talked to him about doing some self-publishing as a viable path for some work
  • trad pub will never touch you if you self-publish: nope, just ask andy weir or hugh hawley, both of whom were self-pubbed before their books got picked up by trad publishers; trad publishers are even starting to view self-publishing as the minor leagues
  • odds of success are better: hard to dispel, because success is so hard to measure; there are people that make good money self-publishing, but there’s so many people that get into it to release garbage; just looking at the money, most writers come out agead with a traditional publisher; to use an analogy, most people strike out with self-publishing but it’s really easy to hit a single or a double, very hard to hit a home run
• tips for anyone:
• • have the best manuscript you can; don’t take your first draft and try to shop it around
  • learn to spell! don’t just accept what your spellchecker gives you
  • billy wilder: if you have a problem with your third act, you probably have a problem with your first act; clines thinks that’s true of careers as well
  • follow the guidelines: don’t send your horror novel to hallmark; don’t violate the expectations of your genre, like trying to sell a 250,000-word romance novel
  • don’t assume you’re the exception: yeah, they’re always there, but don’t assume that’s going to be you
  • develop empathy: if you can’t see things from other people’s perspective, you’re going to have a short career; need to be able to see how publishers and readers are going to see it; his grandparents recently died, and they never read any of his books
  • top tip: SLOW DOWN: take your time, don’t rush to get somethig out to market, you’ll have better success taking the time you need to send out a better product
• screenwriters that aren’t represented: going through screenwriting contests is a great way to get noticed
• • nicholl fellowship
  • screenwriting expo
• fact: when he met her, clines’ girlfriend made a living winning screenwriting contests

Comics Tag Teams: Writing and Drawing Action

• mark waid
• mariko tamaki
• matthew rosenberg
• dan jurgens
• kelley jones
• gail simone
• what as an artist would you want to tell writers about their scripts?
• • just give me a few sentences and let me go
• mariko: always tries to have a skype call with the artist so you can establish a relationship of trust; it’s always like a first date, little awkward, but you’ve got to figure out how best to work together
• gail: prefers writing full script, marvel style ends up taking too long for her; still lets artist suggest changes, but likes to control the action since it’s such a great way to show character
• comedy takes space, to give it the right timing, put the pauses in
• gail: asks artist what they like to draw, and what they hate, so she can tailor her writing to that
• ever changed your script for the art?
• • mariko: yeah, totally, all the time
  • matthew: for the collaboration, yeah, you rewrite once you see the art, always

Full-Time Creative Work on a Part-Time Schedule

• mario martinez: co-founder of tomato tv
• topher davila: started out graphic design, then animated pilots, then almost sold show to disney, etc
• james frye: theconguy.com
• dr rina balzinger: dean of a college in socal, quitting to take charge of a music school in LA
• gene trembo: manager of krypton radio, reaches 165 countries, transmedia company starting to look at publishing books, and starting animated webseries called mighty aprodite
• gene: don’t wait for permission to be creative, life’s too short
• gene: don’t say “i want to be a writer,” say “i’m a writer” describe yourself as the artist you want to be to other people
• james: orient your life so it points towards your goals; change where you are, who you hang out with, so you point in that way; except for spiritual and health pursuits
• case in point: if you want to write for tv, or be in entertainment, you have to move to LA
• topher: anyone you meet could be an opportunity; don’t close yourself off from tripping into other stuff, he started illustration found he’s good at management and he enjoys it, it’s rare in creative people so he can translate between business and art sides
• mario: use what you know in your writing; approaches character building analytically because he was a historian for years
• ron coleman, phd: specialty is regenerative medicine: turning skin cells into stem cells, working with sd zoo to bring back southern white rhino; also writes comic called kevin the drunk jedi
• ron: always have cards with you that you can pass out to people; give them out to everyone
• when you get a card, write down on the back where/when met and what you talked about
• need illustrators? check creative marketplace online, and the comics creatirs conference in long beach in the spring
• scheduling? always leave time for 2 minor disasters. at least one will happen

WonderCon 2018 was amazing! So much more relaxed than Comic-Con.

I’ll do a summary post about the Con later this week, but I wanted to get my notes from Day One up first thing :)

Note: Some of the panelists’ names are probably misspelled, because I couldn’t always get close enough to see their placards :/

A story is a story: writing in multimedia

• sam sykes: bring down the heavens series; also munchkins series
• Sarah kuhn: heroine complex series; also comics
• Judd winick: artist and writer for dc comics and indies
• Judy ann neeb: librarian and moderator
• What was your first writing medium?
  • Judd: comic strips; was meat and potatoes work, you write and draw and ink and letter everything yourself, then send it out
  • Sarah: zines; at the time, heard you could write everyday and get paid for it by being a journalist; so middle school started their own zine, photocopies printed out and gossip about cheating on math tests, etc
  • Sam: devoured every dragonlance novel ever, and then all the dragons disappeared, so what’s the point, might as well write his own thing now, started with prose because art was hard, went right to novels, because that’s what he’d read, sold first novel at 25, but had been working on it since 14
• Weird how market has shifted, short fiction is basically dead, can barely sell it, let alone make a living at it, unless you do nothing but anthologies, or maybe you get known as a novelist first, which is backwards, thirst for short fiction isn’t dead, though, just look at subreddits for people posting and consuming it by the ton, we’re just looking for the next way to do it
• Short fiction used to be the minor leagues for writers, eventually would get asked to do a novel, but nowadays path seems to be through self-publishing more than short fiction
• To be a creator today, you almost have to master multiple media, unless you can just knock one of them out of the park, to keep up with everyone else, need to be in many places at the same time
• Sarah’s approach to comics: voltron-ing skills?
• Judd: Everything other than one-room-one-person work (which is rarer now) means working with a team, so have to work on your social skills, interact with other people and compromise with them, in larger teams, bottom-line is still storytelling within the tiny garden you’re given
• Sarah: whenever starting a new kind of writing, still feels like an imposter, owes her current career to short fiction, wrote geek-girl rom-com for her friends, serialized it online, did a pdf zine, got a bit of a following because wasn’t that many geek-girl protags, that series helped her get an agent when she had a novel ready; was approached to write comics, someone asked her to, she said yes but i have no idea how to do it, she did a lot of research before diving in, reading and interviewing and going through samples, before realized it is telling a good story at its base, same basic skills, though with different scaffolding on top
• Judd: not enough credit given to editors who find people say “do you want to do this?” and barrel through objections from the writer about not knowing how to do it
• Sam: as the mediums change, you start relying on more and more people, novels is just him and an editor, comics is him and artist and editor and letterer, etc, what it comes down to is the ability to trust other people, you’ve got this idea and you’re trying to get it out there, and trusting other people in that process is hard, comics is littered with the carcasses of writers who did not understand that trust of the artist that’s needed
• Judd: best advice for writing comics from bob shreck the editor and founder of oni press: write the script like it’s a letter to your artist, like you’re talking to a person, and that’s how you can make things a partnership
• Worth mentioning that artists understand geometry and positioning better than you do
• Has there ever been a point in your writing where you’ve wanted to change the format? From comic to novel, or novel to script, etc
  • Judd: never been able to switch gears; not that the option is always there, don’t sit around saying “i think this would be better as a major motion picture, lemme make a call”; people have asked him to do prose, but when he starts thinking of a story, by the point he’s excited about it, he wants to draw it, that’s what he enjoys doing as an artist
  • Sarah: never wanted to switch in the middle, gets hooked into whatever the right media is for the story, and sticks with it; tried to make her heroine series very visual, since they’re inspired by comics
  • Sam: one of the marks of being a professional is putting your head down and barreling through, can’t chase every thought in your head, unless you’re pat rothfuss (and if you tell him i said that, i’ll tell him you’re lying, and he’ll believe me); your idea of perfect keeps changing, so no use in chasing that perfect, best to do many projects at the same time, not all of them have to be finished at the same time, if you have a novel, nothing can stop you from tweaking it a little and making it a comic, but if you want to do it as a living, you have to barrel through and finish it, which means you have to choose
• Judd: advice he gives to kids about writing: know your ending, if you’re going to do a novel, do it, finish it, get a draft, and then you can edit it and make it better; writing is the worst, he likes editing, when he can fix it
• Sam: a little like constipation, sometimes you just gotta sit down and force it out
• Judd: greatest job in the world, we get to make shit up and people pay us money, i’m 48 and i draw and half-watch television, like when i was ten
• Sarah: often feels the script for comics ends up being a conversation back and forth between writer and artist(s), her first comic was smaller team, used to tell the colorist “more sparkles!”, felt like her own little clubhouse, initial scripts for clueless series were more detailed, since had a different artist, once they started getting art, got to more a shorthand with her

Spotlight on VE Schwab

• Written 15 novels in 8 years
• No trunk novels, doesn’t start novel until she knows she has enough for the novel to come to fruition
• Longest time, had just an image for darker shade of magic: wounded man falling through a wall and hitting a girl dressed as a boy
  • Six months later, hit on the idea of doing an homage to harry potter, a multiple worlds story
  • What if the young man isn’t walking through a wall, is walking between worlds?
  • That shot became the crystalizing ingredient needed for the book to come together
• Always working actively on one thing and letting 3 or 4 others simmer
• Leans towards fantasy, because grew up wanting the world to be stranger than it is; Wanted the cracks in the sidewalk to lead to other world; as a writer, wants to seed your world with doubt, wants you to look for the stranger things in the world
• Was 11 when harry potter came out, and started reading the books; didn’t love reading at the time, mother’s friend was in a bookstore in socal and called her mom “hey, there’s someone here doing a signing, her line’s not long, it looks like something your daughter would enjoy”… which is why she has a signed copy of the sorcerer’s stone; potter was a hook for her, showed her you could create a story that would make a person forget they’re reading a story
• “What drives the part of your writing where you describe clothes so well?”
  • Really, really loves coats
  • Watching pushing daisies, realized the guy has a really wonderful black trenchcoat
  • Never been very feminine, not a dresses person, but finds coats can be very cool and sexy and not strictly one gender or another
  • Uses fashion because it’s a very good shorthand for a character, lets you visualize the character very easily
  • Kell’s coat is a nod to the room of requirement
  • Kell’s coat, nella’s knives: ways for you to see character easily
• Always been a cinematic writer, resisted writing novels for a long time, wrote short stories and poems and everything else, realized she was afraid of failing to write a novel, so sat down and made herself do it
• Has to see each scene in her head before she can write it; like creating a movie in her head and then translating it into a book
• Loves tv and comics and film, those are her recharge
• Getting to write her first comic now, and that’s so cool because her illustrator can directly translate everything she wants to see
• Nothing better as a writer than to see a lot of fan art and it all looks the same; means you were able to get it across well
• At any given time, have up to 6 projects in development; currently has 3, film makes publishing look very very fast
• “Where does your affection for redheads come from?”
  • Not a natural redhead, is a very light blonde, but never felt like a blonde on the inside
  • Her father is a weasley redhead, and always got teased for it, never felt good about it
• Her male characters are always hufflepuff, and her female characters are slytherin
• Wants to see more ambitious women and emotive men
• “Books not about love, but about entanglements”
  • Loves romance, but so often in fiction, romance supersedes every other kind of relationship
  • And it’s the least interesting relationship, so often these cool dynamics take second fiddle; wants to see more sibling rivalries, more frenemies, etc
  • Loves a long con, where they start out adversaries in book one, but by book three they become involved, because the relationship is built on something
  • Likes room for progress and intensity
  • Really likes familial relationships, thinks rhy and alucard are the core relationship for the darker shade of magic books
• “So how do you feel about ’shipping for your characters?”
  • Sorry, been rewriting a book from scratch for two months, not as articulate as normal, just finished yesterday
  • Fine with shipping, weirded out about it
  • As author brings 50% to the book, reader brings the rest
  • Tries to do nothing to dictate the reader’s relationship to the book and the characters, doesn’t want to control the other side of things
  • Side note: if you have a problem with a female character, especially a strong one, ask yourself if you would be as bothered by them if they were male
• “Interest in monstrosity and monsters?”
  • Grad degree is in medieval depictions of monsters and monstrosity
  • Not interested in monsters so much as outsiders
  • Monstrosity is an easy way to talk about people that don’t belong, to otherness
  • When she does have something that is clearly monstrous, she tries to look at its origins, and explore that
• “Why london for shades of magic?”
  • Two reasons: one, because she wanted to play against the assumptions we have as readers for what kind of story we’re getting in london
  • And two: multiple worlds, all based on the same geography, was thinking how fun would it be if you took a well-known city and take it down to studs, rebuilt it from the ground up with just the geography there, but to do that, needed something a broad audience would be able to imagine with little effort, and london fits the bill: city, with the thames running through it, and bridges, etc
• “Really open with struggles with anxiety, how does that impact writing process?”
  • In savage song, main characters are different aspects of her anxiety: one lashes out, the other shuts down and internalizes everything
  • Didn’t set out to be open about anxiety, set out to be open about publishing
  • When she started, no one was talking about the industry online in an open and honest way
  • It’s very isolating, and you feel like you’re the only one going through it, when really every author feels that way
  • At conferences, she heard other authors griping about it, but then saying they needed to keep the glamour of the job alive, and so shouldn’t talk about it openly
  • She decided: well, i’m going to talk about it, and maybe it’ll help other people
  • Over time, she just became honest about all of it, the publishing, the anxiety, the depression, coming out, all of it
  • Found the most incredible thing: readers started celebrating with her, showing up at events saying “i’m proud of you”
  • Not calculated, not planned, comes from an authentic place
  • 15th book, rewritten in two months, it’s still a struggle, the struggle changes but doesn’t go away
• If you’re writing, even if you’re not published yet, you’re not “trying to write” you’re a writer, we’re all in this tribe together
• “What’s a question you hate getting?”
  • Used to hate “where ideas come from?” Because each book is so different
  • Aren’t any questions she really hates anymore
  • Heard each question enough, tries to answer them in ways that are not just honest but also helpful for others
  • Does get tired of hearing people ask about when the third archive book is coming out, because she knows it hasn’t come out yet, and is very very aware of where it is, it’s a sensitive topic for her
• “Why comics for the steelheart series?”
  • Had this idea for a story, about the king of red london as a prince, with pirates and bad magic, etc, but is working on three more books for the next arc in the shades of magic series already, so thought didn’t want to write it as a book, wanted to do something else
  • Was talking with titan, her uk publisher, and they do comics, asked her if she wanted to do a comic set in the shades of magic world, and she thought: this is perfect
  • So: first four issues are coming out this fall!
• “Also have a middle grade book, and vengeful, the next book in the vicious series”
  • City of ghosts is a weird one, set in edinburgh, scotland, which is where she lives part-time, one of the great things about britain is that everyone has a ghost story, and they’re very blasé about ghosts
  • Middle grade book, but it’s written to 12 year old her, so that’s how she feels like it
  • Girl almost drowns, ghost boy pulls her out, and when she comes back, she pulls him part of the way back as well; her parents pick up a tv series called the inspectors that has them going from town to town doing shows about local ghosts
  • Vengeful: five years have passed since vicious was published, and it’s been five years in that world, as well
  • Has five new female protagonists, and it’s about how women take and hold power in that world
  • So dark, so violent, impressed her how violent it got
  • Comes out in september
• Rapid fire questions:
  • “Live anywhere?”: edinburgh, scotland, just bought a place there, only place she felt like home
  • “Character in other world?”: delilah bard would fit in game of thrones perfectly
  • Favorite villain didn’t write? The Darkling
  • Favorite monster? Voldemort
  • If you had magic, what would you do with it? Definitely rule white london; white london is for the takers, with enough magic, could sit on that throne for a while
• How to switch between middle grade and adult?
  • Only difference is the version of herself she’s writing towards
  • Middle grade: 12 yr old me
  • YA: 17 yr old me
  • Adult: current age
  • Middle grade is beautiful, because you can explore so dark themes, children as so good at reading things that would disturb adults more
  • Tries not to dial anything down, just thinks of terms of writing to herself
• Will the next trilogy be cliffhangers?
  • Doesn’t know
  • Firm believer that the first book should stand alone
  • Apologized for the cliffhanger at the end of book two, but:
  • Second book is a little harder
  • Gathering of shadows was her first cliffhanger, so she went all out for it
  • Should be able to stand a little more on their own, because they will each have their own protagonist, but will build on each other
• Tools that help you write from vast material?
  • Plot is her weakness, plot is not natural for her, so she works on it till it becomes her strength
  • Plot is the skeleton, gotta have it strong to support everything else
  • Marks out five plot points, when she gets to one, she bisects it: what happens halfway between one and two? Etc
  • Had to do a rewrite because spent so much time on makeup for a very badly skeleton’d corpse

Publishing your first comic book

• Ryland grant does stand up during the technical difficulties
• Was supposed to have visual aids, but they’re broken
• Rylend: working screenwriter for years in LA, just recently decided to dive into comics, first book aberrant comes out in june
• Haven’t made comics yet, and you want to? That’s ridiculous, do it
• Never been a better time to get into comics
• Used to have to troll artists alley to get people to draw your book
• Has artists in brazil, in hungary, letterer is in the uk
• Can find everyone with the click of a mouse
• Get off your butts, and do it
• David pepose: interned at dc, first comic spencer & locke (what if calvin and hobbes grew up in sin city) come out last summer, has been pitching everywhere
• Karla nappi: tv writer and script editor, first comic book duplicant will be released by vault comics soon, was a pilot script she turned into comic, set in future where there’s a pandemic of organ failure, focuses on scientist that makes duplicate organs
• David schrader: short filmmaker, recently got baby bad-ass published
• Steve prince: self-publishing guru, six titles so far, including monster matador, set in a future where monsters have overrun humanity, travels world fighting monsters with sword and cape
• Jeff leeds: anthology guru, collections of short stories, easier to produce and cheaper, good way to wade into the water, by day, jeff is exec at nbc
• “What makes it the right idea?”
• “How do you get it into the hands of publishers?”
  • Need a cover, 6 pages of art that’s colored, inked, lettered
  • 6 pages is the min, more is better
  • Then need a treatment: the meat of the story, all the way through
  • Describe your team, list everyone’s experience
  • Need to be able to say “i know where this story is going”
  • Keep it short: no one wants a 60-issue series from someone they’ve never heard of; first arc of spencer & locke is only 4 issues
  • Karla: did five pages, no one would pick it up because they couldn’t see where it was going, so had to publish the first issue herself, find letterer and colorer via conventions, that helped her get a publisher; had a treatment for the first 15 issues, but publisher that picked it up only wanted to do the first 5 and see how they did
  • One place where having a finished book might hurt you would be with a company like Boom! Comics, who want you to use their own artists, and will want to edit it, etc
• Steve: primarily a writer, writing pitches, going to publishers, you’re waiting a lot, very challenging market, but printing is relatively cheap, comixology submit makes it instantly out there, if he has an idea he just does it, no waiting for others to sign off, people more likely to read comic book than a comic script
• Submission process for anthologies is a little different: a short compressed time window for submissions, instead of the eternal death march for regular issues; submissions process is going to be easier, will need pitch and character designs, not whole story
  • One example: theme was las vegas, sent in pitch, they asked for page by page outline, not a full script, and went from there
  • [but how do you find out about these anthologies?]
• Unless it says otherwise in publisher’s site, only email them
• There are really good fb groups connecting comics writers and artists, can use them to find people

Writing Great Dialog

• Merifred scott: writes comics and animation; including guardians of the galaxy and transformers, avengers, spider-man, etc
• Holly hukins: writes animation, usually comedy, first job was on rugrats (first season), story editor on recess, recently created some preschool shoes, now working on 8–11 comedies for amazon
• Jim: wrote a lot of scooby doo, wrote an episode of supernatural where the brothers are sucked into a scooby cartoon, producer and editor on green lantern animated series, etc
• “People from michigan are weird”
• Matt lane couldn’t be with us, has been having back problems
• Craig miller: written curious george, smurfs, beastwars, gi joe, done a lot of international market work
• How many of you are writers or want to be writers?
  • I feel so sorry for you
• Novels are very different dialog than comics or video games or animation
• Harrison ford to george lucas: “you can write this shit, but you can’t say it”
• What is it you keep in mind when writing dialog?
  • Meriford: make sure everyone has a distinct voice, a distinct pov; will go back through and read every line that a character has, all in a row, to make sure their voice is distinct; easy when writing back and forth to have the characters’ voices start to sound the same
  • Craig: every character should have a distinct speech pattern. Each line of dialog should tell you immediately when you hear it who it is
  • Jim: do your own personal table read to your family; read it out loud, always
  • Craig: there are lines that read just fine, but your mouth can’t say them
  • Holly: table read with the writing team is traditional on comedy shows, lets you punch up jokes and catch things like “you started each line here with the same letter”
  • Meriford: uses final draft’s text-to-speech feature to get robotic feedback on how well it works
  • Craig: people of different walks of life, from different parts of the country, speak differently
  • Meriford: definitely don’t want to distract from main character with weird dialog from the auto mechanic, but believes people talk the way they think. An auto-mechanic that thinks with their hands is going to speak differently than one that is very organized and thoughtful
  • Holly: actors really appreciate that. Love it when they can come in and use the dialog to figure out how to play it, because it sounds like how the character thinks and approaches the world
  • Jim: each format has its own constraints and needs; an 11-minute short, every line needs to drip character and be surprising in some way; for an hour-long piece, can let things breathe a bit more
  • Craig: in animation, things have to be happening, no one will watch really long scenes with lots of people talking; in comics can’t have soliloquies, have to keep things moving
• How do you come up with the speech patterns for distinct characters?
  • Meriford: i steal it; noticed female characters tend to fall into sounding the like the same “action lady”, pulled one character from tommy lee jones’ patterns in the fugitive; had one class where they had to ride the bus and listen, take notes, to figure out how people talked
  • Jim: You cast your story in your head, with actors that you’ll never get
  • Meriford: you can even steal little quirks, like how obama used to tell a joke during a speech, and then stop and comment on it, and it was such a dad thing to do
  • Jim: like in improv, you build a character around these traits and quirks, and then put them in situations; what would norman be like at the deli? Things like that
• Jim: what they don’t tell you, the introvert, looking for a job as a writer where you stay in a dark hole all the time, is that what you’re really signing up for is a lifetime selling your story to other people, and you have to become comfortable doing that
• Meriford: hardest part of being a dramatic writer is having to walk into a roomful of people
• How do you juggle between dialog that’s clear and not on the nose?
  • Jim: gotta hide it; to your ear, gotta sound like something someone would say; there are tricks, and everyone’s heard the backstory dialog that sounds weird
  • Meriford: three levels of dialog: first where you mean what you say (hello, i love you, duck), second is when you mean what you say, but you talk about it sideways (“it’d be a shame if something happened to that nice suit of yours”); third level is where you never speak about what you’re actually talk about (gene hackman talking about horses after getting demoted by denzel washington in crimson tide); don’t want to live in number 3 or number 1, want to bounce between 1 and 2; another number 2 example: the fight’s never really about the dishes, even though that’s what you talk about
  • Craig: if you do stop to have a conversation while the t rex is chasing you, it’d better be damn good dialog
  • Meriford: on the other hand, you can stop to have those moments, like hawkeye and black widow in the first avengers: “this reminds me of budapest” “you and i remember budapest very differently”; so much character and backstory embedded in those two lines
• Meriford: loves writing spiderman, because he talks through every fight, it’s a compulsive tick for him, so you never have to kill your darlings in that one
• How do you convey accents?
  • Holly: tries not to use accents, mainly
  • Craig: standard thing in scripts is to put in parentheses “has a german accent”
  • Jim: example, early mistake he made writing scooby was to actually write “rutt-roah”, actor took him aside and said “don’t do that; i know how to do the voice, if you put an ‘r’ in front of every word, i won’t know what it is”
  • Meriford: in print, especially, use a lighter touch with accents than you want to, it’s hard to read, maybe throw in a word or two from the language, or use the ol’ asterisk (translated from the chinese)
• What about characters written as cyphers? Like james bond, a bland character in exotic situations?
  • Meriford: tries to avoid writing bland characters, just as a rule
  • Craig: bond isn’t a cypher, he’s a job, is allowed to show some emotion but in few situations
  • Jim: jack reacher books are like that, he’s a machine, what’s interesting is the situations “the corruption goes a lot deeper than you think”; sometimes it’s not about the character, it’s the world, but the other people have to have a lot of character in their dialog
  • Meriford: if you’re gonna write a character with very functional dialog, give them a quirk or two to give that smooth line of dialog a bump or two, make it seem like they still have some depth

Writing and Illustrating Children’s Books

• Henry herz: moderating, three picture books coming this year; also does self-publishing
• Jenni holm: newberry award winner, three time
• Antoinette portis: will be here later; former creative directory at disney products; ny times bestseller
• Dan santat: ny times bestseller, caldecott award winner
• Deborah underwood: writes intersteller cinderella, supersaurus, here comes cat
• Eugene yelchin: newberry honor winner; haunting of falcon house
• What inspires your writing?
  • Dan: grew up watching 80s tv: a-team, falcon crest, airwolf, a lot of inspiration comes from borrowing other people’s ideas and making them your own, watches all kinds of movies, the weirder the better, anything to jump start his imagination, doesn’t shy away from anything that he might not be into
  • Jenni: pulls things from her own childhood, grew up in the 70s, middle child of five kids, only girl, read a lot of comics, late father was a huge comic fan, weaned on prince valiant and flash gordon, didn’t notice at first that weren’t a lot of women in comics, but when grew up wanted to see herself in comics, stole a lot from her own elementary school life
  • Antoinette: some from own childhood, some from daughter’s childhood
  • Eugene: so many ideas, so much information coming in, hard to decide which ideas to pursue, what he uses to choose between them is the emotion behind them and the strength of the idea, even if he has a poppy idea that would sell books, if he doesn’t feel anything about it, can’t write it, has to let it go
  • Deborah: quiet book inspired by sitting at concert, waiting for it to start, noticed the different qualities of the silence that the crowd went through; for her the common thread is ideas coming out of quiet or out of play
• Questions from the audience: How many pages?
  • Picture book age: golden number is 32 (dan), if you add to it, you add by 4
  • Henry: fictional picture book, you’re looking at 500 words
  • Can find templates online to give a sense of the layout
• All endorse society of children’s book writers and illustrators, chapters all over
• Best book experience?
  • Deborah: new york children’s musical theatre group made her book into a musical, she got to go to new york and see her characters up on stage
  • Eugene: differs with every book, each book is its own world, living in that world for a time, is its own special experience
  • Antoinette: wanted to make her own art, her own property, after working for corporate masters for so long, ran away from disney, everyone thought she was crazy, but felt so good to get away and do her own thing, create her own art
  • Jenni: her son always read other books, had to do a book report on a newberry award winning author, left his book at school, she pointed him to her book, got him to write a book report on her own book
• Audience question: as an artist how do you get on a publisher’s radar?
  • Antoinette: If you join the scbwi, it’s very helpful with all that stuff; can send postcards and have a web site, your target audience is editors and publishers, who are the ones that do the hiring of illustrators, not writers
  • Dan: you’d be surprised who’s looking at websites
• Audience question: what do you think about self-publishing?
  • Henry: it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish; have your own timeline, own creative control, trad publishing is slow; downside is you’re responsible for everything, so either need to be a master at everything, or have a team that can be masters at everything; too often can see people rushing to self-publishing because they want to see their names in print, and don’t want to spend the time honing their craft; don’t think of it as a shortcut around traditional publishing, because the quality won’t be there
  • Antoinette: getting your self-pub book into a bookstore is a full-time job on its own, and as a creative person it’s probably not a job you want to take on
  • Dan: contra that, there are people that like the hustle, so even though they’re talented enough to be trad published, they choose to be indie
• Audience question: proper approach for submitting manuscript if you’re not an author?
  • Deborah: if you’re just an author, double-spaced typed manuscript is fine, if you’re an illustrator and you submit art, it’s a red flag for publishers
  • Eugene: so much depends on the art, better to submit without art
  • Henry: cover letter is typically three paragraphs: what’s the story about, market potential, bio stuff
  • Jenni: industry is more agented now, so becoming standard practice for publishers to not accept unagented manuscripts
  • Henry: true for the big five publishers, but for the medium sized and small pubs, they’ll still accept unsolicited submissions
  • Deborah: also, some publishers will accept unsolicited manuscripts from people that attend certain conferences
  • Dan: some graphic book publishers will even do “new talent” events
• Audience: why prefer children’s books as a medium?
  • Dan: had a cartoon show on disney for three seasons, dealing with executives is a pain in the butt, whereas in children’s publishing, an editor will endorse your views and your voice, your perspective is more intact in children’s publishing
  • Eugene: also comes down to your personality; if you’re more comfortable working in a team, than by yourself, then you’re going to drift into different media
  • Antoinette: knows an author/illustrator that is constantly pitching shows, wants to be in tv and movies, and to her it sounds like hell, don’t make as much money in children’s publishing, but you have more creative freedom, so it’s worth it
• Audience: how has having children affected how you write children’s books?
  • Jenni: they kind of ruin it, actually, productivity went into the toilet; i don’t think you need to have kids to be a children’s author, got her start before she had kids; in fact, recommend not having kids often
  • Deborah: i don’t have kids, and that’s why i have time to write; people write for the age of the kid they actually are, so i’m 6
  • Dan: kids help me become a better writer, because my memories of being a kid are a little skewed, thought was writing with things for himself as a kid, but then had kids, and realized he’d forgotten so much; had to re-discover his childhood through his kids
• Audience: do you see a dramatic change in how you do things with tech?
  • Jenni: kids are growing up so fast now, feels like there’s a renaissance going on in comics for children
  • Dan: thinks the attention span for kids is shorter; take a book like jumanji, that’s 4,000–5,000 words, couldn’t get something like that published today; if you’re pushing 700 words in a picture book, you’re already getting word-heavy
  • Antoinette: counter to kids’ attention span being shorter, is that they are way more sophisticated visually, don’t have to show every step anymore like you used to
  • Eugene: but even grad students these days don’t focus on an image like they used to, we have so much coming at us that we don’t stop to study anything and read an image properly
  • Antoinette: but kids spend so much time with a book, memorizing it
• Audience: appeal to parents first or kids?
  • Dan: flip flops, just tries to make a good book
  • Jenni: writes middle grade, she writes for the kids
  • Antoinette: my 4–5 yr old is dictating what works and what’s funny, want it to not be stupid, for the adult that’s going to be reading it
  • Eugene: little kids don’t buy for themselves, but older kids do, so it’s two different modes; i write for myself as the kid that i was, mostly write for 10–12; thinking about other kids and other teachers would make him too worried
  • Deborah: agree with writing for the inner kids; also likes to put things for the adult reading it that they can chuckle at that the kids won’t get

Inside the writer’s room

• Mark: show runner for the librarians
• Gab stanton: vampire diaries, the flash
• Michael morducci: vampire diaries
• Ryan cordel:
• Ashley miller: fringe, black sails, thor, x-men first class
• Steve melching: star wars rebels, clone wars
• Kay reinalt: twisted, free-form, freakish
• Marc bernarden: alphas, castle rock
• Amy berg: counterpart, da vinci’s demons, eureka
• Chris parnell: co-president of sony pictures studios, worked at sony for fifteen years
• Focus on the awesome task of writing in a writer’s room, a team work, and the writer’s room as a living organism
• What’s inspiring you on tv
  • Amy: obsessed with the good place
  • Marc: also watching the good place, because he does everything amy says, also watching jessica jones season 2
  • Kay: also watching jessica jones season 2, loves it, waiting for the last season of the best show ever, the americans
  • Steve: watching a lot of weird comedies, like another period
  • Ashley: catching up on shows that everyone else has seen, recently discovered community, watching now and it’s perfect in every way: marvellous ms maiselle
  • Ryan: not a comedy writer, but love’s Love on netflix, gets LA completely right, also loves the crown, looking forward to the terror
  • Michael: handmaid’s tale is awesome, wormwood about mk ultra is amazing
  • Gab: the one dirty secret they don’t tell you is that once you work in tv, you no longer have time to watch tv anymore; check out no activity on cbs because it’s surprisingly good
  • Mark: rebels just wrapped up its four-year run, it’s like the breaking bad finale of animation; we binge everything sucks, it doesn’t suck
  • Chris: end of the fucking world is also great
• Philosophy behind a writer’s room: impossible for one person to crank out all the material needed for a series; but lots of studies that argue against group brainstorming, that more creative work comes out of one person
• How important is a good showrunner to a group think session?
  • Kay: most important; if you’re trying to tell a single season story, have to have a strong point of view
• What does it take to be a good showrunner?
  • Chris: movies -> director runs it, writer is just one component; tv -> opposite, writer-driven medium
  • Amy: is really about surrounding yourself with the right people, need the right mix of personalities and skill sets, when you’re hiring crew, need your department heads to be great facilitators, can’t really go it alone and get the job done well (see true detective season 2)
  • Gab: have to manage people, have to manage a ton of money, have to manage all these writers, have to make decisions about all the costumes, etc, have to be the kind of person that can go to someone and say “help me out with this” and be open to what they have to say
  • Marc: have to be able to communicate what your objectives are, so others can march in the right direction and get it done
  • Ashley: best showrunners remind him of the best teachers, a lot of those skills convey, personality type that needs to walk into the room with a plan, but know the plan is going to change as soon as it encounters other people, not quite egoless, but have to let people talk and give them permission to be wrong; it’s a hard skill to teach people that just want to work alone in a dark room
  • Kay: showrunner has to protect the writing staff, has to make the room a safe place for everyone to be able to contribute
• Michael: thinks what makes the best writers who they are is courage and empathy; that’s also what makes a good boss; don’t want to scream at people if they come up with a not-great idea that moves the show forward, because then you won’t get their best
• Recommended: john cleese on creativity; find the video on youtube, it’s great
• Chris: and yet, you’ve got to hold everyone to creative standards in the room
• Michael: agrees, but don’t want to scare people, make them afraid to bring up ideas later on
• Steve: and sometimes, those crazy, bad ideas you pitch lead to the good ones, you laugh about it, and then it frees you up to think of the good one
• Gab: vocab about it, “this is the bad version, but…”
• What kind of structure do you impose?
  • Amy: law of diminishing returns, happens early in the afternoon, comes in with an idea of what she wants to get done, and if she gets there, she gets there, sometimes you have to be willing to call the brainstorm session over and move on
• When breaking season down, use a board, index cards with different color for each character, writer’s assistant is writing everything down, nice feeling that something’s being done because you have a physical object at the end of the day; break down the season episode by episode, or arc by arc
• How do you build a team?
  • Mark: be as brutal as you can, until you tell me i can’t change it anymore, and then tell me it’s brilliant; there’s a real value in criticism, if you can trust that everyone is working toward the same goal, you want to make it better
  • Chris: have to be able to take a note, to teach people how to take notes
  • Michael: was told by a showrunner, most tv writers are not very good, his job is to let them take the script as far as they can, and then come in and make it better; on vampire diaries, they put all the character names in a hat, and everyone had to pull a name, and they became the advocate for that character, kept them from dropping the ones they weren’t as excited about
  • Marc: have to be willing to remember that you’re getting paid to not get everything you want, you’re not always going to win, and you have to be willing to accept that, and move on
  • Gab: writing tv is really about mimicry, because you have to be able to write in the voice of the creator of the show; when she was coming up, you had to write a sample episode, and that proved you could fit into the show; today everyone’s writing their own pilots, and that shows they can write, but not that they can do the work in the writer’s room on the show
  • Mark: “just because you can write hamilton, it doesn’t mean you can write ncis: des moines”
• Ashley: any a-hole can be an artist, the hard part is being a craftsperson, showrunner has to bring an understanding of the craft into the room, and how to use the craft of the writers in the room; pitching responsibly means having an awareness of what the consequences of the idea will be both for what came before and for what comes after; best defense against terrible ideas is “tell me about”, it’s still notes and criticisms, but a different way to think about it, opens people up instead of shutting them down
• Amy: worries that if you have to come to the room with such a complete idea, you won’t bring it, she’s good at ping-ponging off of ideas that are very small grains of things
• Kay: very important when you’re doing it for the first time, that you feel comfortable and not stupid, even when you’re still learning your craft
• Marc: what he wants from a showrunner is the same thing as from a dungeon master; some idea of where you’re going, but the ability to shift things on the fly as the players throw monkey wrenches into things, give them agency in the game; a good DM will roll with the players moving off of the main storyline, and find a way to incorporate it into the main arc

Intro to TV Writing: first draft to staffing

• Possible questions:
  • Previous panel talked about shift from writing episode for the show on spec to writing your own pilot; which is better?
  • How much of the show do you need to have worked out when pitching a pilot?
  • Better to get a gig writing on a current show before pitching your own?
  • Agents? Needed or not needed?
  • Where do you send these scripts? How do you know which shows/editors/producers might be open to them?
• Melissa: wrote for lost, the gifted, veteran of the warner brothers workshop
• Cat: being human, the cape, cw’s arrow, legends of tomorrow
• Drew: marvel’s agents of s.h.i.e.l.d., buffy, arrow, warehouse 13
• How do you go about spec’ing a script of an existing series?
  • Melissa: don’t write for a show you don’t like, it’ll be terrible; watch all the episodes so you don’t do something they would never do; watch a show with a legal pad and do a break down of the show minute by minute, the pacing, how it’s put together
  • Cat: seconds everything she said; first script ever spec’d was lost, tried to make it as much as a contained story as possible, found some plot holes she thought she could fill out; try to find that space to work in that’s self-contained; but also find a way to orient readers that might not have seen the show; she did a “previously on lost” to let reader know where everyone was and what’s going on; everyone said she was crazy to spec lost, but that’s how she got a job on the verge
  • Drew: wrote an ally mcbeal and a sopranos, and a buffy spec, had a meeting with an exec of 21st century fox, they showed it to joss whedon, which is a NO NO
  • Rule: you don’t show the spec you wrote for the show to the actual showrunner, not only will they immediately spot all the flaws, but for legal reasons they can’t read it (might be accused of stealing ideas from it)
• Purpose of writing a spec is to show you can write in the voice of the show
• Dangerous to write a spec for a show that’s been around a long time, because it could vanish, then you’re screwed
• What are you looking for in a script?
  • Cat: ex: for a superhero show, not just looking for superhero writers, right now looking for humor, and writers who can write emotional moments, arcs are very important for them; snappy dialog also great; period piece for a time-travel show; humor and heart
  • Melissa: when reading for vampire diaries, looking for genre scripts, but in a wide range; had to be able to write banter, since it was so critical to the show
  • Drew: it’s character, emotion, and humor, just like cat and melissa said; for example, on agents of shield, they’re all comic book geeks, got that covered, what they’re looking for is emotion, can you write it, can you inspire it?
• Original pilot talk: heard eps lately say they want to read the pilot, others just want the spec
  • Melissa: wants to read the pilot, tells you a lot about who the person is; when go into a meeting, they want to get to know you and figure out who you are as a person; even if you don’t get the gig, it’s not always about you, don’t ever take it personally; when she goes into meetings, starts with the story about why she became a writer
  • Drew: when writing pilots himself, he’s known for comic book shows, so will zig instead of zag, write a family drama; he’s looking for in a pilot is writers that can do some good worldbuilding, present a fully-formed world from the get-go; no place to hide in a pilot
  • Cat: when writing a spec pilot, really take a hard look at your dialog; showrunners will skip prose and go right to the banter, because they’re busy; what separates a good writer from a great writer is finding those voices and channeling them in a way that’s distinct; make it so it sounds like only those characters could sound that way
  • Melissa: harder bar: should be able to say at the end of the pilot: what’s the series? You should have questions, you should get to the end of the pilot script and immediately want to know what’s coming next, and know what sort of questions are going to be coming, what’s the underlying engine of the story
• Audience q: How can get writing to people like them?
  • Drew: the best way is to have an agent, or a manager; need to network, go to writers events in LA, don’t cold-call them, meet them that way
  • Melissa: if she had unlimited resources, would invite a group of writer’s assistant’s out to drinks, find out who needs people
• Audience q: why write a spec script if you can’t show it to the show?
  • Cat: main purpose is to get into any of the writer’s programs for the networks, warner brothers, nbc, fox, etc, all of them need a spec script as part of the application process; also EPs will read spec scripts later on
• Audience q: how much map out for the series when pitching pilot?
  • Melissa: you don’t have to show anything, but as a writer, it’s a good thing to know the big signposts, what’s going in to season two, etc; ed solomon: don’t do it for the money, or the credit, or the fame, do the work, the rest will follow; it seems easy, but it’s not
• Audience q: if a show gets cancelled, does that kill the spec scripts for it?
  • Yes
• Audience q: what’s the biggest oopsie you’ve ever made and how did you get past it?
  • Melissa: do a lot of research on the person you’re going to meet when going into a staffing meeting; know whether they’re casual people or formal, so you know how to dress, how to approach them
• Audience q: biggest takeaway from first season staff writing?
  • Cat: learn how to write on whiteboards, like practice, and get really good at it, because that skill will be enough for you to stay in the room, they’ll keep you just for your ability to write legibly; if you have good board writing, they will love you
  • Drew: really lucky that his first staff job was writing with buffy; once you get into the room, have to be ready to shift your skillset to working with a roomful of (potentially) geniuses; when you’re building a story with other people, it’s like a train, once it’s building momentum, if you’re the person that just says “no, that’s crazy” then you’ve just pulled the emergency brake on the train, no one likes that; gotta learn how to work with people and introduce things gently
  • Melissa: should have been more comfortable in her own skin; surprised by how miserable she could be doing the thing she had worked so hard to do; wasn’t quite the right fit for that staff room, and made it worse by being incredibly awkward; should have done some meditation and relaxed so she could enjoy having made it
• Audience q: elaborate on the fellowship?
  • Cat: replicated feel of the writer’s room, ten people total, all pitching specs to each other, getting feedback; going through very organized process of outline, then vomit draft, then revisions; half of the program was writing, the other half was the business; practice going to general meeting, execs would come in and talk about what they want from writers, etc; got a speech instructor who told them how to speak in public; even had showrunners come in and talk to them; started out as a novice: one tv spec and one pilot; had two more scripts when she was done, and felt ready for a writer’s room
• Audience q: biggest mistakes you see in tv pilots? How about submitting artwork?
  • Melissa: notices people overcomplicate things, ten pounds of story in a one-pound bag; simple idea executed well carries a lot more in the read; ask a friend of yours that you consider a little dense to read it and see if they can make it out
  • Drew: if you need art to back up the script, then you’re failing a bit, since the spec’s purpose is to show you can build the world with just the script
• Audience statement: animation caucus has monthly meeting where they do events with professionals coming in
• Audience q: if you have a pilot, what do you do?
  • Cat: same thing
  • Melissa: if you want to pitch it to a network, helps if you can find an actor who’s interested, will get them to answer the phone, at least
• Audience q: final polishing?
  • Cat: writer friends, use them; writer’s groups can be so helpful; friends get on shows, and then they recommend you, and give you advice
  • Melissa: do a table read; find actor friends if you can, but even if not, just get friends together and have them read it, because you can discover things you missed

I did it! Wrote 1,586 words this week, just enough to make my new goal :)

Novel’s passed 10,000 words, and is still chugging along. So far, so good.

And this kind of pace feels good, too. Not too intense, but not so slow that I don’t feel like I’m making progress. And each week, I get a reward, a visible reminder of how much work I’ve done.

Many thanks once again to Scott Sigler, for hosting that Writers' Coffeehouse weeks ago, and sharing his scoring system with us. It’s really helped me, and I’m grateful.

And now, to pick out some new music! Last week I grabbed Monster Magnet’s Powertrip, an old trippy-rock-meets-cthulhu album that I missed owning. This week I’m considering picking up something from The Stooges, another classic band I haven’t heard a full record from.

Another week, another push. 1,265 words written this week, again just over goal.

I think it’s time to boost my numbers. Next week, I’ll shoot for one extra page, making it 1,500 words for the week. That’s still only 300 words a day, Mon-Fri. Should be doable.

Gotta earn my weekly music :)

And if it’s not doable, well, then I’ve got my penalty waiting for me. Not that I ever want to experience it.

I did end up picking the Black Panther soundtrack last week. I think it’s a little uneven, but still solid (unlike the movie, which I thought was great).

This week…who knows? Maybe time to pick up something I missed from last year.

I did it again! 1,488 words written this week. The streak continues!

The iPad continues to earn its keep, letting me write on my last day in Tahoe and while on the road back to San Diego. Even discovered Scrivener for iOS' hidden word-count tracking feature (hint: tap the displayed word count for a scene while having it open for editing) and used it to make sure I hit my daily targets.

New novel’s at ~8,500 words total, most of those written under the new scoring system. I think I’ll keep it :)

As for music, last week I ended up snagging Ladytron’s Light + Magic, another older album from a band that I’d never listened to before (yes, I rely on the AVClub for a lot of my music recommendations. don’t judge me). This week I’m thinking of picking up the Black Panther soundtrack, since I just saw – and thoroughly enjoyed – the movie.

Still on the road. Got back from the cruise last Sunday, unpacked, did laundry, then re-packed everything to fly to San Francisco on Monday.

Whew.

I was in SF for a work conference till Friday, when they packed us all in buses and shipped us up to Lake Tahoe.

Sounds glamorous, but it wasn’t. We got caught in a snowstorm, and they shut down the main road into Tahoe. Our bus was lucky: it only took us 7.5 hours. Others took 12.

So I went from Baja sunshine to SF gloom and rain to Tahoe’s freezing heights. Oh, and I got food poisoning the next day.

But I got my writing done, dammit: 1,265 words written, the last few hundred pounded out between trips to the bathroom to throw up.

I’ve effing earned this week’s music, dammit.

I’m on a boat!

I don’t have internet access while at sea, so I’m posting this on Thursday, while we’re in port at La Paz, Mexico.

I’ve still managed to hit my weekly writing goal, though, thanks to my (rapidly becoming trusty) iPad :)

Total words: 1,276

No idea what album I’m going to buy as my reward. Last week I ended up grabbing another blast from the past, Orchestral Movement in the Dark’s Dazzle Ships.

I hear the Black Panther soundtrack’s really good…I might pick up that (once we get home).

Second week of using my new writing score system. Managed to turn out 1,489 words for the new book, so I exceeded my goal (again)!

I rewarded myself last week by buying Bauhaus' Burning From the Inside. I’d heard of Bauhaus for decades, but never bought one of their albums before, and this article from the AV Club got “She’s in Parties” playing an infinite loop in my brain. So I took the plunge (and the album’s great, btw).

This week I’m thinking of buying something more recent. Not sure what yet, though.

I’m writing over 300 words most days, so I’m thinking of upping my goal, to 6 pages a week, or 1,500 words. I’m about to do a lot of travel over the next few weeks, though – one week on a cruise for vacation, ten days in Northern California for work – so I think it’d be best to wait until after that’s over. 1,250 words a week is going to be hard enough to hit when I’m on the road.

If we designed doorknobs the way we design software, each one would come with a user manual.

They wouldn’t be guaranteed to work. You could spend hundreds of dollars on a new doorknob, only to find the handle doesn’t turn, and the manufacturer doesn’t offer a warranty.

Your doorknob would have options for direction of turn, speed of opening, and click sound, but not shape or color.

Most doorknobs would be sold without locks. You could get a knob with a lock, but it would be $10,000.

Each door in your house would need a different doorknob, depending on what year it was built. Doors from 1994 would need completely different knobs than 1993 doors. Sometimes you’d be able to put a 1995 knob in a 1993 door, but not always.

Modern doorknobs – made only for modern doors – would understand some voice commands, like “What time is it?” and “When did you last close?” But only from one person in the house, and the commands for opening and shutting would be different depending on which knob you bought and which door you installed it in. Most of these voice doorknobs wouldn’t have handles, at all.

Some people would lay awake at night, wondering if our doorknobs were getting too smart, and would one day rise up and kill everyone.

After attending Sunday’s Writers Coffeehouse, I decided to adopt Scott Sigler’s suggestion of a scoring system. Thought it’d be a good way to push me to get back in the writing habit, after the fiasco that was the last few months.

I decided on the following:

• A goal of 1,250 words a week. That's five pages total, or one page a day if I write every weekday.
• Words on the new novel count full. Words for professional or marketing writing (query letters, etc) count half. So a page of query letter writing equals half a page toward my goal.
• I can't check the news, or do chores, or pay bills, or anything I usually do in the morning, until after my word count for the day is met.
• If I hit my weekly word count total, I get a reward: buying a new music album. I love getting new music, and albums are cheap enough now that I can buy one once a week and not break the bank.
• If I don't hit my weekly goal, I get a punishment: no beer or wine for a week. I'm a big craft beer guy, so this hurts: no more pairing a nice IPA with some fish tacos, or a tiramisu with a coffee stout.

As a result, I’m writing about 300 - 400 words a day, not 250, so I hit 1,554 words yesterday. If I sustain that pace, I’ll need to up my weekly goal.

So hooray for me! I’ll be getting some new music this week :)

Attended my first Writers Coffeehouse in a few months yesterday. I’m glad I did; I came away feeling more like a “real” writer, connected to a community of fellow writers, than I have in a long while.

Plus, our host, Scott Sigler, gave us a system for tracking our progress week by week that I think will help me with my current novel.

Many thanks to Scott Sigler for hosting, and to Mysterious Galaxy for letting us hold it in their (frankly awesome) store!

My notes from the Coffeehouse:

• sports in stories: do enough research that you can color in the character; less detail is more: more detail is more chances to screw it up for people that know it; be specific, but drop it in and move on
• vocal tick, physical mannerism, first name last name: stephen king's technique; uses for secondary characters as a flag or anchor for readers; establishes it all in one paragraph, then uses throughout
• the scorecard: set a weekly goal, meet it, challenging but doable, set consequences if you don't make it (scott loses a bass from his collection for two months)
• not sure what to do? write a short story. you'll accomplish something, and if your brain is distracted by something, that's what you should work on next
• scott sigler: "how to write your first novel" on youtube: unorthodox writing advice
• his scoring system is based on a page: 250 words.
• when writing first draft, it's pure words produced
• second draft: each word counts for half, so double the word count goal and achieve that
• third draft: each word only counts one third
• calls with editor, agent, etc: counts for half (ex: 1,000 words an hour means a half hour phone call counts as one page)
• what about research? doesn't count. research doesn't pay the bills
• characters, relationships, conflict: all that matters. do just enough research to enable the writing. that's it
• research trick: find and read a kid's book on it; they've distilled it all for you
• outlines? depends on how much you use them. if you do: single-spaced, count each page of outline as a page, timebox the work (ex: 2 weeks to get the outline done)
• another reason to put off your research: sometimes only when you get to the end do you know what you need to research (backspackling the grenade needed in chapter 30)
• query letters? that's business, so half-count; set a reasonable goal, like one query letter per week (that's twelve queries in a quarter, not too shabby)
• and track what you've done: on paper, or todo lists, or however, but record your daily work, and total it at the end of the week
• when you make it: celebrate it!
• beta-readers? prefers finding serious readers, not writers. why? TWILIGHT
• best reader is you. take the book, let it sit for six months, come back and read it. you'll see what you really wrote instead of what you thought you wrote
• reedsy.com: site for finding freelance editors; sigler uses it (but do your research, interview them, etc)
• POV shifts: helps show different aspects of the characters, by giving insights from one pov character about another
• tension: a daily chore that if not done causes trouble (the shining: he has to release the pressure from the boiler every day; lost: they have to go down and push the button every day or else); good way to put a ticking clock in your story
• prisonfall: have the characters in danger from the start, use dealing with that as a way to do your world-building
• muse gone? go write a shitty short story; go write some fan fiction; do something else and come back to itp
• recommends putting first book of a series out for free to start out, to get it in the hands of readers, so you can find your audience
• save the cat: great screenplay writing book, woth chapters about elevator pitches
• attendee recommends donald maas' workshop; went last week in irvine, learned a lot
• don't be afraid to say no when you get a contract from a publisher; hold onto all the merchandising, film, etc rights you can