Guest bloggery: While one of Angela’s personalities is arguing with Evil Monkey about who pays for the coffee, another other part is over here, hopefully posting something useful … other personalities are variously conducting a shoe-shine business in New Orleans, drinking coffee in Melbourne and complaining about the weather, and planning a jewellery heist in Paris (wherein I will ultimately be caught due to the permanent nose print I left on the glass surrounding the French Crown jewels) …

I work in a writers centre dealing on a daily basis with – surprise – writers. Some days are great: people have intelligent questions, take advice, succeed. Other days, I feel like I’m chasing my tail, talking to myself, being punished by The Universe … and I start to think ‘If I smack my head against the wall hard enough, it will all go away.’ One of the things I see a lot is writers madly self-promoting … without having written so much as a word on a cocktail napkin or published even a short story or an opinion piece. Oh, they have ‘platform’ – but then, so do many of my shoes – but they have no product. And the fact that this is a problem seems to escape many of them.

And so, may I present a repost of Pondering, something I wrote last February when my brain was ‘sploding … (more…)

(Me showing Shared Worlds students Miranda Severance and Jackie Gitlin some pages from the comics adaptation of my story “The Situation”)

Guest blogging has begun to kick in, and you’ll continue to see it during the week.

Meanwhile, I’ve been teaching at Shared Worlds as well as doing things behind the scenes as assistant director, here at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We’ve got 39 students, and I have to say, they’re all extremely dedicated, creative, and smart. It’s only the second day and they’ve been keeping us on our toes. They’re in the world-building phase and I hear tell of floating islands on the backs of behemoths and steampunk druids and much more besides.

Soon we’ll transition into the writing, partially through a found object exercise. Tomorrow, Kathe Koja gets here, with Nathan Ballingrud following on Thursday. Scott Eagle leads artist workshops over the weekend and next week Holly Black, Will Hindmarch, Michael Bishop, Marly Youmans, and others will all make appearances. These kids have it good, let me tell you.

They’ll also get free books donated by publishers like Small Beer Press, Tor, Pyr, and many more.

Thursday night I read at Hub City Bookstore with Kathe and Nathan. I’m going to do something a little different and use some blown-up images from Eric Orchard’s amazing comics version of “The Situation” to substitute for some of the narrative. In effect subbing in images for some of the paragraphs. If it all goes catastrophically wrong they’ll soon forget it ever happened since I have two great readers following me.

NOTE: Jeremy Jones is blogging about Shared Worlds-related topics on Booklifenow this week and next.

Many people are predicting massive changes to publishing as we know it, and making the case for e-readers, e-books, and a future in which the physical book is only a part of how we view reading sustained, long texts. Here are a few things you should know about the future of publishing, including the fact that small presses may be on the forefront of the wave…

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(Neo and his favorite blankie: photo as stress relief.)

The thing they don’t tell beginning writers? The ghosts of books future come back to haunt you in horrible fashion—they just keep returning prior to publication. You write it or edit it, and that seems like a monumental task…but then the stages of pre-production leer out of the mist at you with precise if jagged teeth.

If you have a lot of books out in a particular period, and you’re working on creating more, this becomes particularly cruel. So while working on Weird and the Steampunk Bible, in come copy-edits on The Third Bear. Or, as now, Monstrous Creatures and Steampunk Reloaded return in spectre-like fashion just as final chapters and rewrites on Steampunk Bible must be done, along with intro, story notes, and whatnot on the Weird. O the horror. I’m not exactly complaining—having lots of books in the pipeline means you’re getting lots of opportunities—but anyone who thinks their involvement with the book is done once they turn it in will be corrected in their thinking by rude visitations…

Last month, I talked about fiction anthologies from my perspective as a reader, as well as soliciting information from others about how they view anthologies.

Now I’d like to further bore you into submission by talking about anthologies from a writer’s point of view. Or, more accurately, from this writer’s point of view. I’m not going to claim to speak for anyone else, or to be proposing anything with regard to anyone else. Also, I am speaking about approaches and kinds of choices that may only be possible because I’m a mid-career novelist with a following (a rag-tag, rebel-led following, but a following nonetheless).

One caveat: most anthology editors are great to deal with, but for purposes of talking about this subject, I may emphasize the negative…

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Before the intertubes, I much preferred anthology publication to magazine publication. For one thing, anthos tended to get more review coverage, and especially before I had books out this meant I was more likely to garner some shout-outs that could be valuable career-wise. It meant I was less likely to be potentially be considered for awards, because Asimov’s, F&SF, etc., tended to dominate the categories. But since being up for those awards was never a career goal (nice, but not a goal), this never bothered me (the value you put on them may be greater, of course).

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(Two more good review of the collection, at the Sacramento Book Review and at Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream.)

It looks like this cold isn’t going to allow me any rest anyway, and I’ve been dipping into my just-published story collection The Third Bear the last few hours, so I might as well talk a little bit about story beginnings, using the book as an example.

Please note that I’m not claiming anything special about my beginnings–readers decide what’s successful or not–but am just telling you about the decision-making process. The first draft may be driven by passion and the subconscious, but it’s also driven by a writer’s prior experience–part of what seems to get on the page by accident is due to years of practice and trial-and-error. Then, in revising the material, you accentuate certain effects, de-emphasize others, and perhaps even start all over again or impose radical revisions. My comments below include elements of “decision-making” throughout this layered process.

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Cat Rambo posted notes from Gwyneth Jones’s speech on reducing world machismo. All makes good sense to me. I find this bit especially interesting because it also applies to fiction:

The Overton Window – the extremes of conversation determine the continuum of the discussion. This is why it’s important to have voices at the extreme left, helping expand the window, which has shrunk in recent years to a point where something previously considered moderate can be considered liberal.

Fiction thrives best when you have extremes of fiction modes being written and reaching readers. Expanding the edges gives cover to material that isn’t quite as out there. Otherwise, the “not-quite-as-out-there” becomes the bleeding edge…and we wind up with a more traditional era of fiction–something we’ve spent the last couple of years coming out of, aided by the infusion of fresh voices from here and abroad. Some writers need more cover than others–indeed, quite subversive writing can get published in the mainstream if it has enough cover.

This is related to the feminism issue, generally, because obviously some of those modes aren’t about the structural (or the formally experimental) but about the nature of who inhabits those narratives and where those narratives take place and what conversations take place therein and the ideas embedded therein. It’s important that a certain number of new voices have the room and space to continue to push boundaries rather than simply replace the status quo with what I’d call correctives or renovations. In such an atmosphere, writers who’ve been publishing but gone invisible during trad periods also have a chance to come back into focus.

Yes, it’s been pretty quiet here. It may continue to be sporadic the rest of this month as I work on various deadlines.

BUT Jeremy L.C. Jones has been collecting writing advice from a variety of sources. Go check it out. The great thing about writing advice? A writer benefits from taking advice, yes, but also from analyzing and then rejecting advice that doesn’t work for them. So you win either way.

I’ve just added the first post from Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward over at Booklifenow, an excerpt from their great writing book Writing the Other. I love Writing the Other because it espouses in a very specific and detailed way what I’ve always thought about writing characters, and even about writing minor characters: you need to fully inhabit them. Which is to say, if your characters aren’t going to just be carbon copies of you and your own experience of the world, you need to be able to see clearly through other people’s eyes.

I’d definitely pair Writing the Other with Carol Bly’s The Passionate, Accurate Story, because the books share a subset of similar concerns. In Bly’s case she talks in depth about the dereliction of duty on a writer’s part when, for example, writing about a character who works for a major corporation doing something illegal (say, dumping toxic waste illegally) without having any sense of how that affects their moral compass or how they see the world. This is an unsubtle, half-remembered example, but the point is: clear seeing from other perspectives is incredibly important to writing nuanced and powerful fiction.

Both Writing the Other and The Passionate, Accurate Story are recommended books in my own Booklife.

(Chapbook cover for Finch limited edition, available through Underland.)

This is the fourth of a series of posts on my novel Finch. Finch is set in my fantastical city of Ambergris, but also borrows heavily from such genres as the spy novel, the noir mystery novel, and certain types of political thrillers. In the novel, an inhuman subterranean species called gray caps has risen up to take control of the city and subjugate the human population. As in Paris during Nazi control, the gray caps attempt to give a semblance of normality by providing institutions of order like a police force, even though these institutions are often merely a façade or horrible/absurd in nature. Against this backdrop, reluctant detective John Finch must solve a strange double murder.

You can find the other entries here:

Finch and Black Hawk Down: Repurposing Technique

Finch’s Opening–intro post

Finch’s Opening–discarded approaches

You can read the first 68 pages of Finch here.

To recap, I felt I had four possible entry points to the novel:

(1) John Finch, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).
(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.
(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.
(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

I tried all four of these approaches, but finally settled on #2. Why? See below.

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