My Agent Told Me To Make A Blog

I'm going to slow down my blogging for the holidays. I've got reading to catch up on, writing to do, and I've run out of stockpiled blog posts. Instead of cranking out a bunch of short, poorly thought out posts to keep up, I'm going to take a month or so to schedule a new stockpile of quality posts. I might also buy a cello. I'll be back in January with writing updates, cool setting pictures, and some recent reads!

Anyone who's ever had their writing critiqued knows that critiquers come with varying skill levels and focus on differing story aspects. But holy moly is there ever a difference between industry professionals and amateurs. First, let's talk a little bit about critiques in general, for a basis. 1. The Reactive Critique Anyone, regardless of skill level, can provide excellent feedback in the form of "this is how I felt while reading." Points of confusion, boredom, what they were looking forward to, what they thought would or wouldn't happen. Honestly this is generally the most helpful kind of critique, and requires absolutely no knowledge of writing technique or experience with critiquing. 2. The Suggestive Critique This is where we see huge differences in critiquers, largely due to the subjectivity of writing and reading. When people take that step from "this is how I felt" to "this is how I think you could fix it," that can lead to won...

Neutron stars are fascinating. Their most distinctive feature is how dense they are. The internet told me once that a spoonful of neutron star could weigh a billion tons (or maybe it was tonnes). To quote Wikipedia (links and all)... A neutron star is the collapsed core of a large star (10–29 solar masses). Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars known to exist. [1] With a radius on the order of 10 km , they can, however, have a mass of about twice that of the Sun . This is not a neutron star, sorry. It's here for atmosphere. And because Wikipedia is more articulate than me trying to paraphrase the same information, Wikipedia also has this to say about their origins: They result from the supernova explosion of a massive star , combined with gravitational collapse , that compresses the core past the white dwarf star density to that of atomic nuclei . If you're like me and can't resist all those Wikipedia links, I have to say this spacey stuff is real...

Writing is a shockingly intimate thing. Whenever I've gotten to know someone through writing, I've never been surprised at who they are. Say I Facebook friend them or start chatting in private messages--I seem to already know them. I'm not surprised by their opinions, their mannerisms, their positions on controversial topics. Conversely, if I already know someone, and I then read some of their writing, it often reveals facets to them that I've never seen before. I really think you show a lot of yourself in your writing. This is particularly fascinating when you consider that characters are often quite different to the authors. The characters may be wildly different from each other, as well, with drastically varying views on a topic or theme. But there's still something in the author's voice that shines through. Maybe it's because each character generally has something of us inside them, even if it's only one tiny piece. Maybe it's the topics we c...

We interrupt our regularly scheduled writing-and-SF-related blog posts to talk briefly about politics. In the days following the 2016 election, there's been a lot of fear and anger. There are plenty of things I could say. Commentary, analysis, fears. Complaints about Trump's complete ineptness at the role and horrible track record of lies, hate, and misogyny. Bitterness about the democratic party forcing us to accept Clinton as their candidate. For now, I don't want to wax too political. And frankly, while I try to stay up to date, I'm not the most experienced or informed when it comes to politics. I have one point I want to make. Before that, the three most important issues to me personally: 1. Donald Trump has enabled others to feel safe voicing and acting upon extreme bigotry. 2. Hillary Clinton is so disliked and mistrusted, she absolutely did not inspire people to vote for her. 3. Now Donald Trump, as president-elect, will become a role model for children...

I wanted to start talking about books that I've read and enjoyed. Not exactly reviews so much as recommendations. I sort of set myself up for starting these posts with an initial list of great sci-fi books I love , but even so, it's daunting to pick only a handful of books to talk about. I love so many books! Nonetheless, here I am, with a relatively recent read (read it last year). I Am Not A Serial Killer is a YA horror/thriller by Dan Wells. Which, you may notice, is totally not my usual genre. I ended up buying this book after listening to a few seasons of the Writing Excuses podcast. He's one of the podcasters, and after hearing his thoughts on writing and descriptions of his book, I couldn't resist. John Cleaver is a fifteen-year-old sociopath who's always been obsessed with serial killers, and when one crops up in his small town, he gets in touch with his dark side to track them down. It's essentially teenage Dexter , which is one of my favorite T...

When we lived in New Zealand, there were a lot of wind farms near us. Wellington in particular, renowned for its windiness, has enough to provide quite a bit of power for the city and local areas. I don't have as many photos of these as I'd like, but I do have some fantastically foggy shots from exploration with my parents. A google search of Manawatu wind farms will yield plenty of other photos of the area. Cows abound in New Zealand, wherever you are. Even on the top of a mountain next to a wind farm. And because of the dearth of photos, here's one of foggy Wellington. The ones above are actually in Manawatu, but I don't have any photos of the Wellington wind turbines, I'm afraid. My thoughts on this as a setting... Well, I love fog. The fog alone makes me love those pictures. As for the actual wind turbine part, that's an interesting and different sort of backdrop. They make a constant sort of hum if you're close enough to them. While t...

Okay, I have to share my favorite veterinary fun fact. It's the one bit of trivia I can pull out at a party (not that I ever go to parties), and always makes clients giggle. If you scruff ferrets, it makes them yawn. Every time. I use it to look at their teeth. It's super cute. That's all.

Completing a first draft is a huge milestone. If you've never done it before, it's almost unbelievable. To look back and see a whole novel that you wrote, with all these scenes, and events, and characters and things. Then there's editing. For most people, I think this is a dreaded step. For me, the only way I was able to finish the draft was to say, "No editing allowed until the full first draft is finished." It was like an itch I was desperate to scratch, and when I finally got the chance to unleash the edit-monster, it was glorious. I plowed right into it. Oh how much I love chewing apart the prose, cutting needless paragraphs, tweaking and pruning and making each chapter shine. This part of the story is a little blurrier in my memory. I did most of it after school while looking for work, and I think I plowed through so much editing, it's hard to distinguish. I gave each chapter to alpha readers, then rewrote, then asked a writing group about it, then ...

Continuing on the saga of how I wound up with a blog titled "my agent told me to make a blog," I've talked so far about opening my eyes to the world of writing, getting my feet wet with critique, and developing a writing "family." Then there's the actual writing part. So far, I only have one brave manuscript that's made the whole journey. There's another one or two in the incubator, but Mr. Debut Novel was the one that went through all the growing pains. I think I've been working on this book for... four years? Or something like that. I know it's not as dramatic sounding as the stories people have been fussing over for twenty years, but it feels like ages to me, okay! I know for a fact that future novels will not take as long, because poor Debut Novel was the one that tripped over every pothole and landed in the ditch at every sharp turn. Thanks to all its bruises, I'm now a little more in control of the wheel. I mentioned before tha...

I previously discussed joining writing forums and critique groups as a means to becoming a better writer. This started me on the path of training my inner editor and looking at writing critically. It had the side-effect of meeting many other writers, and most importantly, people who write things I really like. There's a lot of trial and error with establishing critique partners. Critique Circle has "public" queues for you to meet strangers (as opposed to the private queues, where you invite your established buddies to look over specific work). In general, online resources are fantastic for this because you can look for people who write in your own genre, or with a style to your taste. A face-to-face critique group is geographically limited, and usually you're stuck with whatever tastes and genres the other handful of writers have. And boy, not every potential critique relationship works out, so it's nice not being stuck with the same group of people. I'v...

Last time , I talked about my early writing days of clueless, aimless, ignorant nonsense. Back before I even thought of the writing industry as an industry, before I knew the difference between an agent and a publisher, and when I carried over my childhood writing hobby into adulthood. The key ingredient that allowed me to pupate from wee baby author into proper professional author was: critique. Brandon Sanderson's creative writing videos on Youtube were put up and managed by the website Write About Dragons , so naturally I wandered over there and discovered some helpful blog posts. One person there directed aspiring authors to check out Critique Circle , so I did. And if you don't mind me getting overly dramatic on you, that changed my life. That's really where I found my footing, learned what was what, and got launched in the direction of professional writing. I have checked out other writing sites, and none of them fit me as well as CC. Some are too unprofessional, ...

I wrote a brief summary of my writerly journey back when I started the blog ( The Road So Far ), but it was pretty bare bones, and I didn't mention all the details, such as when I realized I sucked at writing. So I thought I'd go into a little more depth now. Like I've said in the past, writing was always a hobby of mine. Sometimes I ignored it and spent more time on the piano, and my other hobbies frequently wax and wan in relation to gaming. When my World of Warcraft guild fell apart, I moved on to League of Legends, which is way too addicting for me to even have installed on my computer anymore. (Now I've gone and allowed myself to install the Binding of Isaac... and unsurprisingly, my writing output has, uh, decreased). But through thick and thin, I always had stories going. They weren't full-bodied novels--I pretty much never had plots, or much setting, or much of anything. I had characters and fun scenes or adventures I'd write (or start to write). Mos...

The transition from recent graduate to actual vet who sounds like they know what they're doing is a lot about how you present yourself. Far and away the biggest thing I've had to work on is how I talk to clients. In vet school, they spend years teaching you how to handle complicated medicine cases, how to diagnose things and interpret imaging... and if you're lucky, you get a few hours of practice sessions with actors and oral exams with clinicians to work on your client communication skills. Sure, they taught us about it, but it's not like a few hours of practice is going to prepare you to smoothly speak to clients from all walks of life, 8+ hours a day. And oh, I've botched my interactions and explanations so horribly. I've confused people by talking them in circles, I've misspoken during highly charged emotional situations, I've forgotten to ask or explain important details and needed to call people up after the fact. I never realized how big a di...

I don't know about everyone else, but often in writing there's that temptation to leave something as "good enough." That scene isn't perfect, but I think readers will get what I meant. That chapter is a little slow, but the ones around it can compensate. That character's growth arc is a little wobbly, but it's close to what I want. After all, it's hard solving problems sometimes. It's easier to try and tweak a scene that doesn't work over and over, than it is to admit defeat and rewrite the chapter from a different angle. It's easier to try and force a character to work than to cut them out completely. It's easier to say, heck, I've done enough worldbuilding about that culture, it's good enough ! But man, fighting that temptation is so crucial, because that's when it goes from just okay to holy crap I love this. There's always that point where I get sick of editing something. I've read the book over so ma...

I'll bet the Paris catacombs have inspired all sorts of people--authors, artists, poets--with its haunting, otherworldly (underworldly?) atmosphere. You'll have to forgive me for forgetting literally everything factual and historical about our tour there. It was six or seven years ago, at least, and in my usual fashion, the main thing I remember is the awesome atmosphere. I also apologize for the craptastic camera--it's actually the same shitty camera I used for all my New Zealand photos in other posts (yeah... including the ones from last year). We started down a long, dark tunnel. We took a picture at the first light we came to. To give you an idea how long ago this was, I still had long hair. Things opened up to become more carved and well-lit. Not exactly cheerful, but less of a horror movie. To start. (Unless I'm remembering backwards and this part was near the end... I really don't know) After a fairly short distance, you reach this ...

In the past two blog posts , I talked about characters vs real people--how on one hand, characters generally need to be more predictable and consistent, but on the other hand, it sucks when they're so simplified they turn into caricatures. Today I have some examples for you. These aren't necessarily my all-time favorite characters, just a selection of those that feel, in my opinion, well-rounded and "real." Classic Literature Chief from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - It's a great book, and a lot of that has to do with the two main characters. Our narrator, Chief, is fascinating. He pretends to be dumb and stupid, and is therefore able to observe a ton about the characters around him. He's part Native American and has a full life and backstory before he came to the mental hospital, and one of the best parts is how his paranoid schizophrenia slips in to create an unreliable narrator. He's a multi-faceted, layered character, who shows us--the read...

Last time , I observed how characters are expected to be more predictable and consistent than people are in real life. It turns into a bit of a balancing act, because if there's anything worse than a confusingly erratic character, it's one who's so simple, they can be defined by a single word/phrase/role. This is a very common topic on what makes good writing. Characters being flat or well-rounded is a huge area for critique/praise/discussion in books and book reviews. Generally, you know a character's flat when they're nothing more than their role: "the love interest;" "the wise mentor;" "the plucky thief." I mentioned how complex and surprising people can be in my experiences with vet clients , and brought up that same idea: character first, role second. A good example is me! The whole reason I thought of this post is how surprised someone was one day when I wore a dress. People are often surprised when I wear a dress or skirt, ...

People are complicated, confusing, inconsistent creatures. It's interesting to me that characters are often required and/or expected to be a lot more well-defined and consistent than real people. In real life, someone could be cheerful one day, terse the next, and all anyone would think is that they're having a bad day. In a book, if you're not careful, it seems like their personality is all over the place. It's a lot harder for a character to randomly try something or behave a certain way, without a lot of set-up--which is totally not the case in real life. Once, a game commentator mentioned something very similar in his own life.  Day9 has done extensive StarCraft casting and analysis for years. One day he was streaming Team Fortress 2 or some such, because hey, he occasionally plays other games for fun, and he complained about how strongly viewers react when he deviates from the norm--"OMG are you not casting StarCraft anymore?!" He commented on how stre...

In vet school, they taught us some basics about communication and how to get through a consult. A minor part of that was a mention of paralanguage. Paralanguage; noun the nonlexical component of communication by speech, for example intonation, pitch and speed of speaking, hesitation noises, gesture, and facial expression.  In vet exam rooms, the idea is how you portray yourself. Acting interested, engaged, sympathetic, professional. Interestingly, I find paralanguage exists in writing, too. Obviously, in writing, you don't have speed, intonation, or pitch. But the more I critique, the more I find the author's attitude and personality makes it onto the page.  "Speed of speaking" comes through as sentence length and paragraph breaks. "Intonation" comes through with choices of punctuation. Even more subtly, sometimes it shows when an author is confident or knowledgeable--or not. I've read manuscripts from friends who are always self-guessing th...

I am aware of an issue where Wordpress users are unable to comment on posts. I've looked into this, and it seems to be a problem with Wordpress and the OpenID system Blogger uses. That is to say, it's Wordpress's fault so I can't fix it. If you want to comment but don't have a Google or Blogger account, I've enabled the option for you to put a custom name & url ("Name/URL" in the dropdown menu). Sorry for the inconvenience if you tried to comment and couldn't!

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek--especially Deep Space 9. I feel no need to pick sides here, even though I know the DS9 and B5 fandoms have had some, uh, friction . But in my mind, what's better than one amazing sci-fi drama set on a space station? Two amazing sci-fi dramas set on space stations! I suppose if you really, really pushed me to answer as accurately as possible, I'd say Star Trek: TNG is the all-time greatest sci-fi series, and I think a lot of that has to do with its cultural influence and the precedents it set. Babylon 5 , sadly, didn't reach nearly that level of widespread awareness and acclaim. Which is why I'm here to tell you about it today. On first viewing, Babylon 5 looks like a hokey, low-budget rip-off of DS9. I remember, several episodes into season 1, I was wondering what the big deal was about the show, and consulted the internet for reviews. It was okay , I thought, but it wasn't exactly as ground-breaking as I'd be...

You'd think I'd get more used to having an agent, not less. I'm sure as time goes by, my reasons for loving my agent will only pile onto the list. I've heard other authors talk about how wonderful they are when it comes to contract negotiations, fighting on your behalf with the publisher (the book cover, for example), and generally keeping your writing life in order. That stuff is all part of publishing-land, which I have yet to explore. For now, I'm a mere initiate to the Agented Authors Club. But it's an excellent place to be! I love having an agent in general, and I also love my agent. ( Caitlin McDonald of Donald Maass ) 1. She Has Superpowers Apparently she can wave a magic wand and come up with ten different ways to fix plot holes, character arcs, structural issues, and whatever other dilemmas I run into. Problems that have stumped me and my writing partners for years are like breakfast to her. Not only does she have a zillion ideas, those ideas ...

I can't outline. I can't do it. I thought I was an outliner, I wanted to be an outliner, I really tried to do it. But it turns out the more I write, the more I have to admit to myself I don't work that way. Generally writers like to categorize themselves into plotters or pantsers, gardeners or architects, outliners or discovery writers. In plain English, the difference is whether you plan everything ahead of time, or figure it out as you go. I always figured planning ahead was the obvious superior. How else could you end with a bang! How else could you guide the plot and characters along the appropriate path, and plant all the needed foreshadowing, and follow a logical structure? If you just make it up as you go, wouldn't you just meander all over the place and run into walls left and right? Weeeeellll... not really. And I learned this the hard way. Pull of Gravity required a decent amount of organization, because it has a non-linear structure. I had two timeli...

For today's Setting Inspirations I have some stunning pictures of New Zealand vineyards. Not only are the rows of crops gorgeous, the buildings themselves are big, breathtaking, and enchanting. They often have courtyards, fountains, gardens, and historical decorations for the tasting rooms. Every winery was unique, between the "feel" of the grounds and the taste of their wines. I also learned that many of these places have free wine tastings at their cellar door, and while organized wine tours are lots of fun, you can create your own "wine tour" very easily and cheaply. The majority of these photos are from Marlborough or Canterbury. Many of the entrances are covered in arches and vines. The buildings themselves have unique designs or an old, historical feel.       The best part, of course, is the vineyards around the grounds or out back. Usually the tasting room has a good view, with a deck or courtyard so you can sit outside. ...