Disecting Feedback

When I was in seventh grade, we started disecting things in biology. As I look back I think it's because my biology teacher was a boy. He also made us do a bug collection for one of our quarterly projects. Icky. My friend and I didn't want to dissect frogs, so I met her at her house that morning, and we skipped biology. The great thing about this was her mother was there and wrote us a note to get back into school. It said something along the lines of:

"Please excuse the girls from first period this morning. They're whimps and didn't want to dissect frogs."

The school secretaries thought it was outrageously funny and accepted the note.

We weren't allowed to skip the fetal pig dissection, though. ~_~

There are two lessons to be learned here:

1. Sometimes the truth is your best friend, regardless of how cruel it is.
2. Dissection sucks, and you can't avoid it forever, but the sooner you get it over with, the sooner you can move on with life.

And yes, I've stopped talking about biology at this point and moved on to writing. Critiques. Whenever I get a critique from anyone, it doesn't matter who you are or how much I respect your opinion, my first reaction is "What? Are you high?" Follow-up reactions range from "It's not a spectacular story, it's full of flaws." to "Yeah, I know I need to fix that, why did you have to point it out?" to "But I did say that. You just weren't paying attention."

I assume that almost all writers are the same way. Except there are a handful who never have that first reaction. I don't know any personally, though. This is why I've learned that I should never read critiques for the first time in the middle of the night when I can't sleep. And that I should never respond to a critique when I first read it.

I have to let it simmer. Twelve to twenty-four hours is good. That's enough time for me to let the comments stew in the back of my head until my subconscious decides if they're valid or not.

This time, they're valid. At least 75%. And I knew it was coming. My initial reaction was a combination of all of the above. So to that one reviewer who I won't call out today but you probably know who you are since really no one else has touched the piece with a critical eye yet - it probably still won't have enough description when all is said and done, but you were right and my only excuse is 'it was a first draft and I knew it needed work'. Which is followed by the mental - not spoken - 'and I wouldn't have known how to fix it if you hadn't offered your opinion.'

How do you feel about your alpha/beta/advanced readers?

Read more »

A Startling Discovery

I had a revelation on the way to work this morning. This is something I've been sitting on for a while and not wanting to admit, but the more I think about it, the more it seems it may be true. This is one of those things that probably only matters to me, but it's about writing so I'll blog about it anyway.

I realized this morning that I'm not a fantasy writer. I can write stories with fantastic elements, but...I don't write fantasy. The only thing I can think to attribute it to is that I'm a lazy writer. Building worlds - hard. Making them the background in a character driven story instead of a character themselves and still ensuring that the reader understands what the hell you're talking about? Even harder.

Don't misunderstand - I'm not saying that other writing is easy. Character driven stories with arcs and development that actually end up somewhere and aren't just vinettes? Hard. But...easier for me. Okay, at least I think so. This has yet to be validated on a large scale, since most (possibly all)of what I've had published to date are fantasy and erotica short stories, but...

I have to ponder this some more while I create reports with pretty numbers in them. Telling stories with numbers? Much easier than using words. Trust me on this one.

Do you have any genres you love to read and would love to write, but the format of creating in them just escapes you?

Read more »

Knowing yourself

I stumbled on a great post this morning. Well, stumbled isn't quite the right word, the blog showed up in my newsfeed like it was supposed to, but still...The Tripod of Publishing: Know Your Priorities.

Combine that with this Why, Oh Why, Did I Get Rejected?, and you have one of my favorite things to ramble aimlessly about in the hopes that I'll reach a good pausing place.

Publishing is a business. The goal of any business - unless they're a non profit organization - is to make money. If you're not there to make money, it's really more of a hobby. That's not to say that people in the business are just in it for the money. I suspect that unlike a lot of professions out there, those people us authors interract with actually love their jobs. But unless they're independently wealthy, they still have to pay the bills.

Writing is an art. That statement bothers me, because it's too generic, too much of a blanket, but it will do for now. So many of us write fiction because we have a passion to create, to put our thoughts on paper, to share them with the world.

Business and art don't mix. It's like oil and water. Or acids and bases. Or Red Sox and Yankees fans. Or .net and perl programmers.

All right, stopping with the analogies now. You get the point. The thing is, if you're a writer, and you want to be in the business of publishing, you have to know where your boundaries are. Your priorities. What are you willing to bend on and what aren't you? If someone offered you a six-figure advance, would you modify that intelligent YA novel to be more mainstream? If someone wanted to buy your book, but only if you let them put their name on it and you could never fess up to being the original author, would you do it just to see your words in print? Or for the money?

I'm not saying you have to know the answers to these questions up front, or that you'll ever even have to. But having a good idea of where your ethical and moral base are will help make some of these decisions easier if they do ever come up.

Is there anything pertaining to your writing that you don't think you would bend on? Anything that is an absolute deal breaker if you can't have it/have to change it?

By the way, go check out Kate and I.

Read more »

Forcing Myself

I didn't write anything yesterday. I critiqued something. It was a start. My novella was supposed to be done a week ago. It's about halfway there. I'm sitting here whimpering and whining (silently, except that my keyboard is noisy) and thinking "but I don't feel like it."

And I've decided...too bad. I have coffee, I have numbers running in the background. I'm going to suck it up and force myself to write this morning. I don't usually do that, but since I didn't even feel like blogging and I've managed to make that work, I'm going to do it for the writing, too.

At least for the next hour or two (or fifteen minutes if the coffee is too hot), I will shove aside self-pity and actually get things done. I've decided ^_^

Read more »

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity

Before I get into this, my fantastic weekend news is...
Enchanted Conversation accepted my 'Hansel and Gretel' story for their upcoming issue with the same theme. I loved writing the story - it was one of those that came together exactly like I pictured it in my head. It's one of the few times I do dark, so when it's up I'll post a link and y'all can check it out.

****

Start entry

Did you know that over 50 years after it's original pressing, Catcher in the Rye still sells ~250,000 copies a year? The Howard Stern Show was the #1 rated morning radio show in New York from 1994-2001, and he's the highest paid radio figure in the United States.

Before I go any further, I have to go on record and say that I don't approve of censorship at all, especially banning books. If you don't like it, don't read it. If you don't want your children reading it, pay closer attention to what your children read. Don't try and make that decision for the rest of us.

Now that that's out of the way. I don't read my newsfeed on weekends. It's mostly because 1 - I'm addicted to online gaming and 2 - it gives me something to do when I wake up early Monday mornings and need to put myself in a working frame of mind for the week. This morning when I checked out my list of blogs over the weekend, this is what I found on more than 50% of them. 50%

Speak listen
I'm so serious there's no quote today
Speak (a voice)
Speak loudly
I believe this with all my heart

The list goes on. In fact, if you Google 'speak banned' you get pages of blogs about this incident. Once again let me say that I agree 110% with each and every one of these bloggers I've linked to above. Because of that, I won't repeat what they've said (or I'll try not to). They've all said it in such a way that I would do it no justice to try and reiterate.

Now, outside of the fact that I agree with all of them, and you, about this issue, I have an opinion about the whole situation that goes off in a a kind of different direction. Speaking out (no pun intended) against this book may be the worst thing any of its opponents could have done. Exaggerated by the fact that social media makes it possible for anything to go viral (yes, one of my favorite topics), in this day and age taking such a firm stance is a great way to ensure that more and more people know about this book, read this book, buy this book, support this author, etc.

Speak is over 10 years old. Raise your hand if you had heard of it before last week. Keep your hand up if you had read it before last week.

Keep blogging about these things. Keep drawing public attention to banned books and the incredibly ill-thought through reasons why. This is an issue that - like the books its about - should never be silenced. And keep in mind that for every well-written blog post, FB status, Tweet, or anything else verbal or digital that draws attention to the original work, you use the censors words against them. You make their efforts less than useless; you help their own words to hurt their own cause.

Read more »