I know it might be hard to believe, but I am not dead, despite 2020's best efforts! In fact, I am going to be at Virtual Dragon Con, participating in the Virtual Mentoring sessions!
2020 Dragon Con Writer's Track Virtual Mentoring Guests
We have 30 established authors and other publishing pros who've generously donated their time and expertise to host 15-minute, one-on-one mentoring sessions with aspiring authors. If you're signing up for an acquiring editor or publisher, you are welcome to pitch your completed book!
If you are meeting with an established author, the door is pretty wide open. You can ask about craft. If you're struggling with something specific, you can ask them about it. We have a number of indie authors, so if you're interested in self-publishing, you can pick their brains. Think about what you want to get out of this dedicated one-on-one session and choose your mentor accordingly.
So, who am I in all of this, if you're just encountering this link and haven't read my books or this blog?
Anthony Francis - Thinking Ink Press & Author
Session schedule: Friday - 4:30, 4:50, 5:10, 5:30
Secret origin: By day, Anthony Francis teaches robots to learn; by night, he writes the Dakota Frost urban fantasy series (FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE) and the steampunk Jeremiah Willstone series (THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE). He's also an editor, and co-founded Thinking Ink Press.
Genres & expertise: I'm a science fiction, urban fantasy and steampunk author with experience in space travel, general physics, artificial intelligence, robotics, cognitive science, fictional magic and myth, and real and fictional military systems.
Acquisition wishlist: we're looking for fresh voices in science fiction accessible to new audiences. We've recently published YA military science fiction and humorous cyberpunk novels featuring LGBTQIA characters, and have also published a series of steampunk anthologies.
If you're interested in talking with me about writing science fiction, urban fantasy, or steampunk, or would like to talk about a new book proposal of interest to Thinking Ink Press, the signup sheet for sessions is here: https://form.jotform.com/202435857025050.
This is the first time we've done this virtually, but I've participated before in the live events (on the mentee end, rather than mentor :-D) and found it very valuable. So come on board, ask your questions, and help us make Virtual Dragon Con a success!
Virtual Dragon Con is already running - and I've been on two recorded panels already for the Writer's Track, though I don't know when they'll air yet, just figuring that out myself - but please go check it out and help the world have fun in the face of the zombie apocalypse!
-the Centaur
Wow, um, pandemics. SO, short story, I've been having a rough one, which is why you haven't seen me on this blog. Perhaps the story of my suffering is a story for another time, because I just found this Camp Nano post back from APRIL which was never published because, wow, um pandemics. Congratulations to you, zombie apocalypse, for throwing me off my game! Yay for you, Miss Rita, I guess?
SO ANYWAY, what I'd like to announce, what I planned to announce at the end of April but forgot to post, and now what I have to doubly announce at the end of July, is that I have completed the Camp Nanowrimo challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of April!
And, um, then, I did it again in July.
For those who don't know (how long have you been reading this blog?) National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November, and Camp Nanowrimo is a pair of choose-your-own goal sister challenges in April and July. I do 50,000 words each time, for 150,000 words a year. So far, I've done this (successfully) 27 times ... so my April Post was going to be "Viiiictory, A to Z" and there would have been some dang title for July, Plus One. But whatever, here's a graph of Nanos for you; from the dark line, it looks like my output this month (the dark line) was a bit more ahead of the game than normal (the average is the dotted line):
What was I working on?
This April, I mostly finished JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE, a "novel" made from a collected set of short stories set in an alternate Victorian era filled with strong women, rayguns, and aliens . The first of these stories, "A Choir of Demons," was published in Aurora Wolf magazine, and collectively, they tell the tale of how Jeremiah grows from a wet-behind-the-ears Lieutenant to the leader we see in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. My friend Tony Sarrecchia, creator of the Harry Strange Audio Drama, is helping me adapt these to audio.
This July, I started Dakota Frost Book 7, SPIRAL NEEDLE. Dakota, the best magical tattooist in the Southeast, faces a new challenge when her weretiger daughter Cinnamon gets mixed up in a lycanthrope attack, and Dakota will move Heaven and Earth to make sure Cinnamon is safe ... if she can just figure out who's trying to hurt her, and why? This book actually excites me about writing Dakota Frost again - vampire-werekin medicine, Colonial American plague doctors, and secret societies - even if it is perhaps is distracting me from finishing the editing of DF #4-#6 and Cinnamon #1-#3.
But the pandemic, and all the other business going on in my life, has drained my energy for the very difficult task of editing --- and drained my energy for many other things. (Hence no blog posts since my cats came back from the hospital, though they got sick again; they're fine now). In this crisis, some people have died, some are sick, some have lost loved ones, some have lost jobs, and many just feel like they've lost their minds. Fortunately, I'm on the good end of the spectrum: I have my wife, I have my cats, I have my job, and I'm still able to write. For all of that, I count myself blessed.
As for the rest ... well, I'm picking up the pieces and getting back on an even keel, step by step.
Please bear with me while I am beating off the bears.
-the Centaur
Pictured: two hangry cats. They were both sick, just prior to the pandemic, and that was rough enough that I thought I had real problems. Ha! I guess the coronavirus showed me. At least I'm getting to eat some tasty and delicious vegan food.
So, 2019. What a mess. More on that later; as for me, I've had neither the time nor even the capability to blog for a while. But one thing I've noticed is, at least for me, the point at which I want to give up is usually just prior to the point where I could have my big breakthrough.
For example: Scrivener.
I had just about given up on Scrivener, an otherwise great program for writers that helps with organizing notes, writing screenplays, and even for comic book scripts. But I'd become used to Google Docs and its keyboard shortcuts for hierarchical bulleted lists, not entirely different from my prior life using hierarchical notebook programs like GoldenSection Notes. But Scrivener's keyboard shortcuts were all different, and the menus didn't seem to support what I needed, so I had started trying alternatives. Then I gave on more shot at going through the manual, which had earlier got me nothing.At first this looked like a lost cause: Scrivener depended on Mac OS X's text widgets, which themselves implement a nonstandard text interface (fanboys, shut up, sit down: you're overruled. case in point: Home and End. I rest my case), and worse, depend on the OS even for the keyboard shortcuts, which require the exact menu item. But the menu item for list bullets actually was literally a bullet, which normally isn't a text character in most programs; you can't access it. But as it turns out, in Scrivener, you can. I was able to insert a bullet, find the bullet character, and even create a keyboard shortcut for it. And it did what it was supposed to!
Soon I found the other items I needed to fill out the interface that I'd come to know and love in Google Docs for increasing/decreasing the list bullet indention on the fly while organizing a list:
Eventually I was able to recreate the whole interface and was so happy I wrote a list describing it in the middle of the deep learning Scrivener notebook that I had been working on when I hit the snag that made me go down this rabbit hole (namely, wanting to create a bullet list):
I found the same thing with so many things recently: stuck photo uploads on Google Photos, configuration problems on various publishing programs, even solving an issue with the math for a paper submission at work.
I suspect this is everywhere. It's a known thing in mathematics that when you feel close to a solution you may be far from it; I often find myself that the solution is to be found just after the point you want to give up.
I've written about a related phenomenon called this "working a little bit harder than you want to" but this is slightly different: it's the idea that your judgment that you've exhausted your options is just that, a judgment.
It may be true.
Try looking just a bit harder for that answer.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a photo of the Greenville airport over Christmas, which finally uploaded today when I went back through the archives of Google Photos on my phone and manually stopped a stuck upload from December 19th.
SO! After yet another National Novel Writing Month, I have added yet another 50,000 words of rough draft to my writing output - making this the fourteenth time I have won Nano, and the twenty-fifth time I have won one of the Nanowrimo or CampNanowrimo challenges! Woohoo!
This month wasn't so bad, though there was a bit of a dip around the time I was writing report cards for our robot learning systems ("Little Johnny 5 tries very hard, but needs to work on his cornering!"). But, as usual, the week I took off for Thanksgiving "vacation" put me back on track:
Yes, one day I did indeed get 6000+ words written, which was a record for the 25th of the month, but nowhere near my record of 9074 words - written on the 30th(!) of November 2016, in what I recall was a delerious mad dash sitting on my sofa wracking my brain to produce enough words to make my goal for PHANTOM SILVER. Frankly speaking, that sucked, and since then I have redoubled my efforts to ensure that I'm never THAT far behind.
So this month looks typical. It's interesting to me how much Nano has become a part of my life. First tried in 2002, first made into a yearly habit in 2007, and first made into a thrice-yearly habit (Camp April, Camp July and November Nano) in 2014-2015 ... now I've done Nano 27 times, with 25 successes, for 1.36 million words of rough draft ... it's a heavy feeling.
Do I want to keep doing this? Absolutely. I wish I had more time to, like, edit my books, so I didn't have a backlog of 6 finished novels, 2 novellas, and 5 partially finished novels. (Gulp!) But I like having a roof more, and the time and money to pay for my laptop, my nice dinners, and my late nite teas and mochas, so, teaching robots to learn by day it is, for the time being.
One of the most interesting things for me is how Nano breaks through your creative barriers. When I started on MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE, then titled TWO YEARS OF HELL, I had the idea of writing an action-adventure steampunk hard science fiction story around computer science concepts, and conceived it as a connected tale made of 16 short stories --- two to the fourth power, a number beloved of many computer scientists.
But as I've written, the story has sprawled out from my original design, and there are at least two, perhaps three set pieces which may demand their own stories. Or perhaps existing stories will have to be cut or deleted. I don't know; I just create the worlds, but once they exist, they follow the laws of physics (plot and character physics). Here's an excerpt from one of those diversions, which may or may not make it into the final design:
The dark doorway loomed before her like a maw. Jeremiah steeled herself: she had been her at best a handful of times, but she felt like she knew every rivet of the damned hatch, felt like she was right back to waiting on the damn Keepers while they prepared themselves.
Oh, she did not, did not, did not want to be back here.
Yet she was, not a child, but a Major. She straightened, nodded.
“Major?” asked Thompson, looking back at her. “You look a bit green.”
Jeremiah smiled, to give herself a moment to speak. What would a cracker-jack young major say? Or … wasn’t that putting on airs? What would General Weiss have said? Perhaps she should just be … honest?
“Good eye, sir, but I don’t just look it: I feel it too,” Jeremiah said, forcing a grin—was that fake, or did she just want to take this in the best humor possible? “Every time I’m here, it takes me right back to my childhood.”
“Childhood?” Thompson asked. The white hairs in his saltpepper eyebrows sparkled as his brow beetled. “Why were you here as a child?”
“I, foolishly perhaps, asked to see the thing that killed my mother,” Jeremiah said. “And … foolishly perhaps, the powers that be let the granddaughter of Benjamin Willstone get what she asked for.”
Thompson stared at her strangely, then turned away.
“I would have let you,” he said at last. “Seems to have been the first step into forming a fine soldier who doesn’t flinch.”
“Oh, I assure you, I flinch,” Jeremiah said. “Just not from duty.”
“That’s the Major Willstone of my reports,” Thompson said. He leaned over and said a bit cheekily. “I hear you scream like a girl even when you’re firing both blasters at point-blank range—”
“Why, I never—” Jeremiah colored. “Well, that does speak to character—”
“Yes, yes, it does,” Thompson said, “and to good sense. Alright, in fairness: the report just said ‘cried out in shock before blasting the thing,’ but one could imagine the girlish scream—”
“Oi!” Jeremiah said. “Wait, what thing was this?”
“Er,” Thompson said, as the hatch opened. “I … don’t recall. Frankly, Major, with your record, the monsters start to blur—”
“Not all of them,” Jeremiah said, striding forward with a projected confidence she absolutely did not feel. “Have a look at that.”
SO! I love to write, and four of my novels are published - FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK, LIQUID FIRE, about magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost, and JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, about steampunk heroine Jeremiah Willstone.
You can read about the published ones at my Novels page, but even though life got a bit away from me this year, I haven't stopped writing - I have six more finished novels in the editing queue, not to mention half a dozen more in process.
And every single one of these novels, published or not, was largely written in National Novel Writing Month in November (or its sister challenge Camp Nanowrimo in April and July).
Nanowrimo is a 501(c)(3)that helps people find their creative voices - and certainly helped me transition from mostly not-writing to writing over a million words of fiction! (Way over, now).
Every year, I donate to the Nanowrimo foundation to help them not just keep the lights on but to support young writers everywhere with their Young Writers Program. This year, consider helping them bring literacy and creativity to more people all around the world!
-the Centaur
So you may have noticed the blog theme and settings changing recently; that's because I'm trying to get some kind of slider or visual image above the fold. I love the look of the blog with the big banner image, but I'm concerned that people just won't scroll down to see what's in the blog if there's nothing on the first page which says what I do.
So I'll be experimenting. Stay tuned!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Yeah, this isn't the only renovation going on.
So I read a lot and write a lot and occasionally edit what I write and even more rarely, something gets sent to an editor and turned into a publication. But this seems slow, for always there are more thoughts that I have in my head than I seem to have time to put onto a page and share.
Also I seem to get stuck in ruts. Actually I like ruts - I’m in one now, eating near my house and bank and pet food store at a restaurant with really good iced tea - but only ruts that are good for getting things done, like ruts in a well-trodden road.
When ruts leave you spinning your wheels in the mud, it’s time for a change. This can be as simple as engaging the locking hubs on your stuck all-wheel drive truck to get out of the mud, but you have to know that those locks are there to engage them. (True story).
So in order to grow, you need to learn. But if you learn, and you don’t tell anyone, then when you die, what you learn is gone. Fortunately, at the dawn of history humans learned how to speak to the dead, if only the dead are first willing to share, through their stories.
I don’t recommend waiting until you’re dead to tell your story. (Most people find that disturbing). Instead, it’s better to organize your thoughts - to reflect on what happened, what you’ve learned, and to package it the lesson with its context so it’s easy to share, like knowledge in a little case.
But I don’t do that all that well. I read for entertainment, and I occasionally write things down, but I rarely reflect, and I even more rarely share. But in my attempt to grow, I’ve read some things that made me think, and it made me want to find a way to make me share.
I like to LEARN, of course, usually some technical material related to writing or my job, and I’m now consciously reading books to GROW, like Art Matters by Neil Gaiman or It’s Not How Good You Are but How Good You Want To Be by Paul Arden. But I don’t take time to ORGANIZE those thoughts, nor do I seem to take time to SHARE them. That made me think.
I already take time to LEARN and GROW. I’ve already decided I need to take more time to ORGANIZE my thoughts, to be a better scientist. Can I also take some time to SHARE? Maybe I can put all those together into, like, an acronym! And that acronym will help me do it!
Okay, then, let’s go: LEARN-GROW-ORGANIZE-SHARE. LGOS!
Well.
That’s a terrible acronym.
Alright, alright, if first you don’t succeed, go home and rethink your life. Or something like that, like rethink your acronym. LEARN and GROW need to come before ORGANIZE and SHARE, but G is a better thing to start a word with, as GL or GR is a more common start than LG.
And I’m doing it to GROW. So perhaps it could be GROW LEARN, or GROW READ, naturally followed by ORGANIZE. That gets us GRO, which followed by S for SHARE is one letter short of GROSS; but what if instead we got to the point, and said what we have to do: WRITE.
So, here’s what I recommend to you (well, actually, to me): take some time every day to
GROW yourself by
READing to learn,
ORGANIZing your thoughts, and share them by
WRITING
GROW-READ-ORGANIZE-WRITE: GROW. Why, that’s nicely recursive: GROW to GROW! Since it is recursive, let me try this GROW thing out with this very GROW thought.
There.
How did it go?
-Anthony
So my author reading IS on tomorrow, though you can't search for it by name (my name appears in the panel description, but not in the panelists), it does show up on the list at 11:30 tomorrow (um, today, Saturday):
Reading Session: Anthony Francis Time: Sat 11:30 am Location: Marietta - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Anthony Francis)
I'll be reading from a mixture of my fiction and nonfiction, urban fantasy and steampunk, published works and unpublished works, and maybe even a preview of the Jeremiah Willstone radio drama!
Or, since this got finalized on the schedule at the last minute, I might just be reading a book by myself in a quiet room. Either way, so full of win! :-D
-the Centaur
P.S. It appears my author signing is still on the schedule, so I will also be appearing at 2:30 on Sunday:
Title: Author Signings
Time: Sun 02:30 pm Location: International Hall South 4-5 - Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Anthony Francis)
So I will be appearing at "Social Media for Authors" at 4pm at Hyatt Embassy CD. Perhaps they're including me as the counterexample. Here's my advice to you on social media for authors: if you get into it, consistently engage it, and don't let anyone bait you into being a jerk. Imagine anything you say could end up on the front page of the New York Times, and you'll be fine.
-the Centaur
Woohoo, I made it! After what seems like a year and a day of foo, I am finally back at Dragon Con! I had a wonderful dinner with writer friends, wandered the show floor seeing all the great costumes on the moral equivalent of Preview Night, and had a nice cocktail in the hotel bar, where I apparently sold two Muggles on Doctor Who! (We also talked about the Three Stooges, Wayne's World, and bingewatching Agents of SHIELD).
My reading session this year is in theory Saturday at 11:30 in Marietta [Hyatt] though it for some reason hasn't shown up on the schedule (and they have an author signing listed for Sunday instead). Investigating. In the meantime, my schedule this year is moderate:
Social Media as an Effective Tool for Authors
Social Media is an author's best friend/worst enemy. This panel discusses how to maximize the benefits without the side effects.
Time: Fri 04:00 pm Location: Embassy CD - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists:Moderator: Bill Fawcett, Anthony Francis, Tyra A Burton, Anya Martin, Trisha J. Wooldridge, James Nettles)
When Life Intrudes
Writers often seem impervious to their surroundings. But occasionally life throws us a problem we have to face head on. How do we manage career & crisis at the same time?
Time: Fri 10:00 pm Location: Embassy CD - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Holly Sullivan McClure, Katherine Kurtz, Nancy Knight, Anthony Francis)
Reading Session: Anthony Francis Time: Sat 11:30 am Location: Marietta - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Anthony Francis)Fightin' 'n' Writin'
How to write realistic fight scenes--whether utilizing guns, edged weapons, martial arts...or something not yet invented.
Time: Sat 10:00 pm Location: Embassy CD - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: John D. Ringo, Clay and Susan Griffith, Anthony Francis, Alison Sky Richards, R M Meluch)
Stitch & Witch
We are getting crafty for a bit. Feel free to bring projects to share or work on! While we explore the role that art, crafts, & hobbies play for characters & worlds.
Time: Sun 11:30 am Location: Embassy EF - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Jody Lynn Nye, Anthony Francis)
Transformations: Shapeshifter Magic
Urban Fantasy features many types of shapeshifters. Our panel of authors will discuss the type of magic used by their characters & where their inspiration regarding it is rooted.
Time: Mon 11:30 am Location: Chastain 1-2 - Westin (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: D.R. Perry, Tina Glasneck, Jennifer St. Giles, Aaron Crash, Anthony Francis)
About four years ago, one of my colleagues at work found out I was a writer and asked, "So, tell me Anthony, how can I be a better writer?" I don't claim any special wisdom in this department, but I do claim two things: first, that I have opinions about the matter, and second, that I wrote a long email to my friend about it, an email which I thought I'd posted on my blog. Unfortunately, after an extensive search, I wasn't able to find the post.Now, I could attempt to clean this email up prior to posting it here, but I'm afraid that if I do that, I'll just end up going several years without posting it.SO! Here's that email, largely unedited, on "How to be a better writer!"
Sorry it took so long to respond to your question about how to be a better writer - I thought I wrote an article on this on my blog, or perhaps in an email to a friend, but if so, I couldn't find it. Then I tried to write a long response, but that turned into something book length. So let me give you the short version.
First, just write! That's the best thing anyone can do to become a better writer. Ten thousand hours of practice can build mastery in almost any skill, so the first thing you can do to help yourself is to write regularly - preferably, about whatever comes to mind, so you're not trying to practice when you're on the spot.
Try morning pages. The best tool I know to help people get into the habit of writing is to write morning pages - writing, each day, ideally when you get up, three pages in a notebook. Write bla bla bla if you have to - you'll get bored of it quickly, and will write what comes to mind.
Take a creativity course. The book The Artist's Way is one of the most famous of these, and it's what inspires me to suggest morning pages. Actually, I've never finished this course - I always get so energized just trying it that I get sucked off into my own projects. Try one that works for you.
Read more than you write. You can't consciously choose the words that come out as you write them; they come from your subconscious. So it's important to feed your subconscious with a lot of interesting material to help you generate a lot of interesting material of your own.
Read great writing of the type you want to create. What you enjoy reading most might not be the writing you want to emulate most, so hunt down the great writers of the type of writing you're aiming for, read them, and try to figure out what you like about them - and what makes them tick.
Read great books on writing. The first two I always recommend to people are Ayn Rand's (yes, that Ayn Rand) The Art of Fiction and The Art of Nonfiction. More than any book I've ever read, the Art of Fiction boils down what makes good fiction writing. John Gardner's On Being a Novelist is another great, but there are so many of these it's hard to pick one.
Read great books on style. The two I recommend to people the most are The Elements of Style by Strunk and White and Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon. Strunk and White is the classic, and Building Great Sentences is its antidote. If you have to pick one, pick Building Great Sentences - hands down.
Do writing exercises. There are many, many of these - The Artist's Way has some, at Barnes and Noble you can find dozens of books like 500 Writing Prompts or Creativity Bootcamp that have others; the important thing is to try different writing styles on.
Try timed challenges. Write to the End (writetotheend.com) tries 20 minute writing challenges; Shut Up and Write ( meetup.com/shutupandwritesfo ) tries (I think) an hour; National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org) tries 50,000 words in a month. These cure you of the notion you need to wait for your muse.
Join a writing group. Not a critique group - those are dangerous until you get more confidence in and acceptance of your own writing (and a thicker skin). I already mentioned Write to the End and Shut Up and Write, but there are many more (even some at Google, such as the Creative Writing Lunch).
Take on writing projects. Write novels, write stories, write essays, write memoirs, write documentation, write songs, write plays, write poetry, write haiku, write impenetrable postmodern explorations of what it means for something to be writing - but take on a writing project that has a beginning, middle, and end ...
Finish what you write! This is so important I wanted to write this earlier, but the problem is, it depends on what you're writing for. If you just want to improve your skill, reading Strunk and White might do it - but if you want your writing to go further, you need to finish what you write.
Don't edit while you write! Some people do this very well, but most people have two modes: producing text, and refining text. Unless you're very confident in your ability to not rework the first paragraph of something forever, make sure you first finish, then edit. But before you do that ...
Let your manuscripts cool off. It's hard to have perspective right after you've finished something. At least sleep on it, if you have time; ideally, come back to a story after a week or two and see if what you wrote before still makes sense to you and does what you wanted it to. In the meantime ...
Work on something else. Start something new. Creating a new work has an almost magical way of solving problems you have in the work you have cooling on the back burner. Your skills improve, you're not invested in your old ideas, and you come back with a fresh start.
Revise your work! Give your manuscript at least a once over. I guarantee, it's not perfect. The books Self Editing for Fiction Writers or The Elements of Editing can help you with this task. It's worth working on something a bit until you can't see anything obviously wrong to it.
Share your work with a friendly audience. You're not ready for a critique group yet; they're often way too harsh. What you want are three friendly reviewers: a coach to help with your skills, a critic to help find flaws, and a cheerleader to praise goodness - and if the cheerleader complains, listen very closely to them.
Revise your work again before sending it out. Listen to your friendly critics. Revise your work. Make it the best it can be. Then you're ready to send it out - to a critique group if you have to and if you have one, but ideally, to where you want the work received or published.
Keep your work circulating until sold. This may not apply to bloggers, writers of memoirs, and internal communications, but if you've got something you want to send to an external audience, send it to as many places as you can. Some great books went to dozens of publishers before getting accepted.
Don't argue with your critics. Whether it's a friend, a critique group, or an editor, they're not critiquing you to hurt your feelings. Listen carefully, and perhaps if there's some small misconception, feel free to clear it up, but ask yourself - why wasn't your story so clear that they got it the first time?
Solve the problems your critics raise, but don't feel compelled to use their solutions. Humans are great at confabulating fake reasons for the feelings they have. Don't feel the need to use every suggestion your critics raise - but if two or more have problems at the same spot, listen closely.
Learn from your genre. Whether it's writing a thesis, writing documentation, or writing science fiction stories, there are documents out there on the pitfalls of the genre and the techniques from success, from How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation to the Evil Overlord List.
Learn from the style guide. If you're aimed at a particular market, whether it's a science fiction magazine accepting William Shunn's document format, or a book publisher who wants the Chicago Manual of Style, or it's the American Psychological Association, read the style book. With a grain of salt, of course.
Learn from publication. Once something is published, take a look at the published work. I can guarantee you, you'll find something about it you'd do differently now, whether it's a typo or a new way to phrase things. Think carefully about this difference and what it can teach you.
Find a great critique group. By this point, you've been exposed to enough information to have your own opinions and to make up your own mind - and that's the right time to engage a whole bunch of other opinionated, thoughtful people to get their ideas of how to improve your work.
Find a great workshop. These are harder to get into, but put you in touch with great writers of your particular genre or style and can really take you to the next level, if that's what you want.
Find a great program - or embark on a great project. If you really want to be a writer, some people suggest a MFA program or other longer-term, intensive course. I simply prefer to take on little projects like 21 book urban fantasy series; these force you to learn some of the same things. :-D
Well, that's about it for the short version. As I said ... the long version's probably a book. :-) I hope this helps! Please feel free to ask me more questions!
And there you have it. I hope that's not a repeat!
So, March was pretty bad: I had to fly back East because Mom ended up in the hospital, we had a mad rush to finish a paper which both screwed up my time at GDC and Clockwork Alchemy AND failed to get in on time, and I found out I was suffering from chronic sinusitis.
Not to be outdone, however, June decided to throw me a bigger one.
So, Mom's gone. She passed after what sounds like a beautiful week with friends and family - I spoke to her the day before she died, and she went to visit the neighbors and swing on their back porch until almost nine - and then collapsed while changing the bed linens in her own bedroom in the house she'd lived in for forty years. Of ways to go, that's a good one.
Regularly scheduled blogging will resume ... sometime.
"Robots in Montreal," eh? Sounds like the title of a Steven Moffat Doctor Who episode. But it's really ICRA 2019 - the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, and, yes, there are quite a few robots!
My team presented our work on evolutionary learning of rewards for deep reinforcement learning, AutoRL, on Monday. In an hour or so, I'll be giving a keynote on "Systematizing Robot Navigation with AutoRL":
Keynote: Dr. Anthony Francis Systematizing Robot Navigation with AutoRL: Evolving Better Policies with Better Evaluation
Abstract: Rigorous scientific evaluation of robot control methods helps the field progress towards better solutions, but deploying methods on robots requires its own kind of rigor. A systematic approach to deployment can do more than just make robots safer, more reliable, and more debuggable; with appropriate machine learning support, it can also improve robot control algorithms themselves. In this talk, we describe our evolutionary reward learning framework AutoRL and our evaluation framework for navigation tasks, and show how improving evaluation of navigation systems can measurably improve the performance of both our evolutionary learner and the navigation policies that it produces. We hope that this starts a conversation about how robotic deployment and scientific advancement can become better mutually reinforcing partners.
Bio: Dr. Anthony G. Francis, Jr. is a Senior Software Engineer at Google Brain Robotics specializing in reinforcement learning for robot navigation. Previously, he worked on emotional long-term memory for robot pets at Georgia Tech's PEPE robot pet project, on models of human memory for information retrieval at Enkia Corporation, and on large-scale metadata search and 3D object visualization at Google. He earned his B.S. (1991), M.S. (1996) and Ph.D. (2000) in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, along with a Certificate in Cognitive Science (1999). He and his colleagues won the ICRA 2018 Best Paper Award for Service Robotics for their paper "PRM-RL: Long-range Robotic Navigation Tasks by Combining Reinforcement Learning and Sampling-based Planning". He's the author of over a dozen peer-reviewed publications and is an inventor on over a half-dozen patents. He's published over a dozen short stories and four novels, including the EPIC eBook Award-winning Frost Moon; his popular writing on robotics includes articles in the books Star Trek Psychology and Westworld Psychology. as well as a Google AI blog article titled Maybe your computer just needs a hug. He lives in San Jose with his wife and cats, but his heart will always belong in Atlanta. You can find out more about his writing at his website.
In the words attributed to Trevor Noah, "Why do you invite a tiny lion into your house to pee in your box of sand?" Well, he's small, cute, and furry, and emits calming noises. Kind of like an animate stuffed animal. After years of exile during his Yellow Years, Gabby is once again an inside cat, and this morning he crawled atop the bed and fell asleep atop me.
Here's hoping he keeps up his good behavior. I need a little something that takes the edge off the stress. Not that I have existential worries to stress about; humans adjust to set-points, so my main stress is figuring out how to make my very good job become a slightly better job, or how to prevent it from becoming a slightly worse job, all while still having time to write.
Not that I have enough time to do that either, but at least I can blog again.
Wow, I just won {Nanowrimo|Camp Nanowrimo} for the twenty-third time!
For readers of this blog who have missed, like, 75% of my posts over the years, National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November, and Camp Nanowrimo is its sister challenge in April and July. I adapt this to write 50,000 words on top of whatever I'm currently working on, and have been doing it since 2002.
This is my 25th Nano or Nano-like attempt, and my 23rd victory. (Interestingly, my two failures were times that I tried Nano on my own, without the motivation of the Nano "Validate your Project" button).
This month, because of friggin' March, man, I started out pretty far behind, compounded by my robot work and the fact that I was working on JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE. This is less a novel than a series of loosely connected novellas, each slightly different in setting and tone, and has been my most research-heavy project to date. But, nevertheless, I got back on track and climbed the mountain.
Interestingly, a couple of the days in there were my most productive writing days ever - 7,000 and 8,000 word days, right up with the 9,014 word day that I did once on the last day of Nano. I didn't want to do that again - I wanted to take today off - so I powered through 8000 words on Saturday, finished with 2,600 words on Sunday, and leisurely wrote 2,000 words today unpacking a few of the ideas I had that were still fresh.
And now, the traditional excerpt:
“So,” General Weiss said, sitting down. “You desire to become one of my acolytes?”
Jeremiah glanced over at him, trying to contain her glare. “I desire to learn, sir.”
“What I have to teach is not easy to learn,” Weiss said, patting her leg. “It requires long-term commitment, supreme dedication, self-sacrifice—”
“Are …” Jeremiah felt her brow furrow, tried to control it. “Are you aware of—”
“The nature of your injuries?” Weiss said. “Yes, I heard you were reckless.”
“No, sir,” Jeremiah said. She hit the switch to raise her bed until she could look the man more closely in the eye. “I have been injured, repeatedly, because I have been sent into the line of fire without adequate support, repeatedly, and I did my duty, repeatedly.”
“The story goes is that you tried to leap across a city street, four stories up.”
“No, sir,” Jeremiah said. “A monster that had killed dozens was about to make its escape, and I leapt for it, sir, dragging it down to the street, possibly saving hundreds more lives—well, that’s debatable, but I definitively stopped it, at least that is not in dispute—”
“No, no, you’re quite right about the outcome of the operation.” Weiss rubbed his hands together. “And whether I think you’re reckless in the large, I would never dispute the actions of a operative in the clinch. But do you know why the enemy exposed itself to you?”
“I …” Jeremiah said. “But it didn’t. We caught it, and tracked it—”
“Yes, yes, and let’s not dispute that either,” Weiss said, leaning forward. “A hypothetical. Imagine you had two operations running, physically separated, one large and important, one … less so. To protect them, you can run recon missions looking for the enemy, but the enemy might find them. You can run ten recces in the operation period. Where do you put them?”
“Er, well,” Jeremiah said. “Proportionally on the more important—”
“No,” Weiss said. “You run five. All around the least important one. Why?”
“Er …” What clues had he given? “The larger force, is well, larger. It can defend itself.”
“Yes. And?”
Jeremiah’s eyes narrowed. “You want the recces caught?”
“No, not really, but I do, yes.”
“But the smaller force, exposed—”
“And overwhelmed,” Weiss said, “by a mass mobilization of the enemy. Away from my primary force. Now the other five recces probe ahead of the main op, clearing the way while the decoy fights for its life. If done properly—if the decoy force is given both a true objective and the best chance of success, their fight for their lives will only attract more enemy forces. If they win, you have a true two-front victory. If they fail, you don’t even need to send reinforcements—the moment the main force engages the enemy, the enemy will naturally pull back.”
Jeremiah’s brow furrowed.
“Yes, yes, there are many specifics which would make this kind of plan succeed or fail,” Weiss said. “To truly instruct you, we’d need to work through many more patterns, then make them concrete for the kind of forces you will end up commanding—”
“All of them,” Jeremiah said.
“What?”
“I’m going to command all of them,” Jeremiah said. “My aim is to be Minister of War.”
“Oho,” the general said. “Then we have a lot of work to do. Tell me why the thing exposed itself to you. Quick, now.”
"They're—" Jeremiah's mouth fell open. "The things are wearing us down."
Sounds like they have a lot of problems on that boat. The first of the stories in THE MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE is already out: A Choir of Demons, at Aurora Wolf. For the rest ... well, you'll have to wait a bit. Enjoy!
Wow, it's been February since I posted. I mean, I knew February was busy working on robots, and that slowed me down some, but March, man. I found out my long-running cold was actually chronic sinusitis, my Mom ended up in the hospital and I had to fly back to see her, and then we had another big robot push, right in the middle of the back-to-back Game Developer's Conference and Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention. The robot push didn't work, necessitating another solid month of work.
SO, yeah, March, man.
Now, at last, things seem to be chilling out. Let's see if we can get to that blog backlog ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gabby and Loki, mortal enemies, chilling with me on my lap on my front porch. They got up there by themselves, I swear.
Our world is big. Big, and complicated, filled with many more things than any one person can know. We rely on each other to find out things beyond our individual capacities and to share them so we can succeed as a species: there's water over the next hill, hard red berries are poisonous, and the man in the trading village called Honest Sam is not to be trusted.
To survive, we must constantly take information, just as we must eat to live. But just like eating, consuming information indiscriminately can make us sick. Even when we eat good food, we must clean our teeth and got to the bathroom - and bad food should be avoided. In the same way, we have to digest information to make it useful, we need to discard information that's no longer relevant, and we need to avoid misinformation so we don't pick up false beliefs. We need habits of information hygiene.
Whenever you listen to someone, you absorb some of their thought process and make it your own. You can't help it: that the purpose of language, and that's what understanding someone means. The downside is your brain is a mess of different overlapping modules all working together, and not all of them can distinguish between what's logically true and false. This means learning about the beliefs of someone you violently disagree with can make you start to believe in them, even if you consciously think they're wrong. One acquaintance I knew started studying a religion with the intent of exposing it. He thought it was a cult, and his opinion about that never changed. But at one point, he found himself starting to believe what he read, even though, then and now, he found their beliefs logically ridiculous.
This doesn't mean we need to shut out information from people we disagree with - but it does mean we can't uncritically accept information from people we agree with. You are the easiest person for yourself to fool: we have a cognitive flaw called confirmation bias which makes us more willing to accept information that confirms our prior beliefs rather than ones that deny it. Another flaw called cognitive dissonance makes us want to actively resolve conflicts between our beliefs and new information, leading to a rush of relief when they are reconciled; combined with confirmation bias, people's beliefs can actually be strengthened by contradictory information.
So, as an exercise in information hygiene for those involved in one of those charged political conversations that dominate our modern landscape, try this. Take one piece of information that you've gotten from a trusted source, and ask yourself: how might this be wrong? Take one piece of information from an untrusted source, and ask yourself, how might this be right? Then take it one step further: research those chinks in your armor, or those sparks of light in your opponent's darkness, and see if you can find evidence pro or con. Try to keep an open mind: no-one's asking you to actually change your mind, just to see if you can tell whether the situation is actually as black and white as you thought.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the book pile, containing some books I'm reading to answer a skeptical friend's questions, and other books for my own interest.
So the new Doctor Who has finished her historic first season, which I found had its ups and downs: episodes like Arachnids in the UK, Kerblam! and The Witchfinders really resonated with me, whereas The Tsuranga Conundrum, The Woman Who Fell to Earth and Rosa really did not. Episodes like Rosa, Arachnids and The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos wrestled with great ideas and even reached for greatness at points but had baffling lapses in logic, whereas some of the most iconic images and ideas, like the crane leap and the "I'm the Doctor, sorting out fair play throughout the universe" came from episodes I find myself the least interested in rewatching.
But leave all that aside: from th beginning, this Doctor caused a sharp divide among fans, there's a huge gap between audience and critic ratings, and there's a persistent rumor about this Doctor being a failure because of low ratings. Go out into the blogosphere, and you'll see conspiracy theories of a particular blogger telling his fans to downvote Series 11, and other conspiracy theories by these fans that the viewing numbers of the series are somehow inflated because people just can't possibly be watching it.
I won't dignify conspiracy theories about reviews or ratings: there's a lot of genuine fans unhappy with the new Doctor, and there are millions of people watching it, more in my circle than have ever watched it before. But I can address one question solidly with real data: is Jodie Whittaker's Doctor doing worse in the ratings than the Doctors who came before her?
No, she's not doing worse; she's doing just fine.
Taken from the Wikipedia articles on this series and its predecessors, along with the Doctor Who Guide, I was able to put to rest the conspiracy theories about Jodie Whittaker having some kind of ratings dropoff compared to the other Doctors. Nope. All of the recent Doctors start well, drop off, and rise near the end of the season. Jodie is right on track - in fact, slightly better than average for 11 episodes into the season. True, she hasn't had the insane spikes in ratings that David Tennant and Matt Smith got near the end of their runs, but those were series of highly promoted event specials.
I rather like Jodie Whittaker's Doctor, and I love the emotional arcs of the new series, and Bradley Walsh is so damn good I could probably enjoy watching him watch paint dry, but the stories in the new season need a little work on basic logic and truly threatening monsters. Logic in the new Who was always a bit dodgy, but it's getting worse, and the lack of series-long arcs and recurring monsters is doing the Doctor no favors.
Here's hoping in the 2020 season the Who team keeps doing what they're doing well, while also finding ways to do more of the things that made classic, um, New Who great.
I know it might be hard to believe, but I am not dead, despite 2020's best efforts! In fact, I am going to be at Virtual Dragon Con, participating in the Virtual Mentoring sessions!
Wow, um, pandemics. SO, short story, I've been having a rough one, which is why you haven't seen me on this blog. Perhaps the story of my suffering is a story for another time, because I just found this Camp Nano post back from APRIL which was never published because, wow, um pandemics. Congratulations to you, zombie apocalypse, for throwing me off my game! Yay for you, Miss Rita, I guess?
SO ANYWAY, what I'd like to announce, what I planned to announce at the end of April but forgot to post, and now what I have to doubly announce at the end of July, is that I have completed the Camp Nanowrimo challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of April!
And, um, then, I did it again in July.
For those who don't know (how long have you been reading this blog?) 
What was I working on?
This April, I mostly finished 
At first this looked like a lost cause: Scrivener depended on Mac OS X's text widgets, which themselves implement a nonstandard text interface (fanboys, shut up, sit down: you're overruled. case in point: Home and End. I rest my case), and worse, depend on the OS even for the keyboard shortcuts, which require the exact menu item. But the menu item for list bullets actually was literally a bullet, which normally isn't a text character in most programs; you can't access it. But as it turns out, in Scrivener, you can. I was able to insert a bullet, find the bullet character, and even create a keyboard shortcut for it. And it did what it was supposed to!
This month wasn't so bad, though there was a bit of a dip around the time I was writing report cards for our robot learning systems ("Little Johnny 5 tries very hard, but needs to work on his cornering!"). But, as usual, the week I took off for Thanksgiving "vacation" put me back on track:
Yes, one day I did indeed get 6000+ words written, which was a record for the 25th of the month, but nowhere near my record of 9074 words - written on the 30th(!) of November 2016, in what I recall was a delerious mad dash sitting on my sofa wracking my brain to produce enough words to make my goal for PHANTOM SILVER. Frankly speaking, that sucked, and since then I have redoubled my efforts to ensure that I'm never THAT far behind.
So this month looks typical. It's interesting to me how much Nano has become a part of my life. First tried in 2002, first made into a yearly habit in 2007, and first made into a thrice-yearly habit (Camp April, Camp July and November Nano) in 2014-2015 ... now I've done Nano 27 times, with 25 successes, for 1.36 million words of rough draft ... it's a heavy feeling.
Do I want to keep doing this? Absolutely. I wish I had more time to, like, edit my books, so I didn't have a backlog of 6 finished novels, 2 novellas, and 5 partially finished novels. (Gulp!) But I like having a roof more, and the time and money to pay for my laptop, my nice dinners, and my late nite teas and mochas, so, teaching robots to learn by day it is, for the time being.
One of the most interesting things for me is how Nano breaks through your creative barriers. When I started on MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE, then titled TWO YEARS OF HELL, I had the idea of writing an action-adventure steampunk hard science fiction story around computer science concepts, and conceived it as a connected tale made of 16 short stories --- two to the fourth power, a number beloved of many computer scientists.
But as I've written, the story has sprawled out from my original design, and there are at least two, perhaps three set pieces which may demand their own stories. Or perhaps existing stories will have to be cut or deleted. I don't know; I just create the worlds, but once they exist, they follow the laws of physics (plot and character physics). Here's an excerpt from one of those diversions, which may or may not make it into the final design:
Every year, I donate to the Nanowrimo foundation to help them not just keep the lights on but to support young writers everywhere with their 
So my author reading IS on tomorrow, though you can't search for it by name (my name appears in the panel description, but not in the panelists), it does show up on the list at 11:30 tomorrow (um, today, Saturday):
So I will be appearing at "Social Media for Authors" at 4pm at Hyatt Embassy CD. Perhaps they're including me as the counterexample. Here's my advice to you on social media for authors: if you get into it, consistently engage it, and don't let anyone bait you into being a jerk. Imagine anything you say could end up on the front page of the New York Times, and you'll be fine.
-the Centaur 
Woohoo, I made it! After what seems like a year and a day of foo, I am finally back at Dragon Con! I had a wonderful dinner with writer friends, wandered the show floor seeing all the great costumes on the moral equivalent of Preview Night, and had a nice cocktail in the hotel bar, where I apparently sold two Muggles on Doctor Who! (We also talked about the Three Stooges, Wayne's World, and bingewatching Agents of SHIELD).
My reading session this year is in theory Saturday at 11:30 in Marietta [Hyatt] though it for some reason hasn't shown up on the schedule (and they have an author signing listed for Sunday instead). Investigating. In the meantime, my schedule this year is moderate:
About four years ago, one of my colleagues at work found out I was a writer and asked, "So, tell me Anthony, how can I be a better writer?"
I don't claim any special wisdom in this department, but I do claim two things: first, that I have opinions about the matter, and second, that I wrote a long email to my friend about it, an email which I thought I'd posted on my blog. Unfortunately, after an extensive search, I wasn't able to find the post.
Now, I could attempt to clean this email up prior to posting it here, but I'm afraid that if I do that, I'll just end up going several years without posting it.
SO! Here's that email, largely unedited, on "How to be a better writer!"
Sorry it took so long to respond to your question about how to be a better writer - I thought I wrote an article on this on my blog, or perhaps in an email to a friend, but if so, I couldn't find it. Then I tried to write a long response, but that turned into something book length. So let me give you the short version.
