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Posts published in “Fiction”

Things I make up for a living.

That Sock Drawer

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What to do with the stories in your sock drawer?

For those of you who don’t know, the “sock drawer” is where short stories go to die, named after the place you file manuscripts away after you’ve exhausted your efforts to sell, edit, or burn them. Stories go through a life cycle:

  1. You Get the Idea: Sometimes, this is no more than a title. Most people stop here.
  2. You Start the Draft: You actually start writing! Most people never get here.
  3. You Finish the Draft! Most people who get to Stage 2 never get to Stage 3. Believe it or not, this is the hardest part.
  4. You Edit the Draft! Some people get stuck forever here, or skip this entirely, like bloggers. :-)
  5. You Let Other People See It! I call this the ”beta” stage because I generally don’t let people see stuff until I’ve edited it.
  6. You Send It Out! You send the story or novel out for publication.
  7. It’s Accepted Right Away! Editors ALWAYS accept stories, right?
  8. ???
  9. Profit!

Actually, MOST of the time markets don’t accept what you send them. From what you see above, it seems like I’ve got a pretty good acceptance rate, but that’s actually counting by stories. If we instead look at how many times I sent them out:

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Yeah. And even that’s a bit exaggerated, since I get invited to write a lot of stories, so if i was to tease the data apart to look at my cold-call rejection rate, I would get very depressed. So really there are a few more stages which can happen after you send things out:
  • You Keep Circulating Your Work: If first you don’t succeed, try the next magazine or site on the list.
  • You Revise Your Work: A clever editor’s comment, or more insight, leads you to rework your story. Go back to Step 4.
  • You Get Stuck: You don’t know how to fix your work, but aren’t ready to give up yet. You’re essentially at Step 3.
  • You Give Up: You convince yourself the work can’t be fixed … and dump it in your sock drawer.

As you saw from the first diagram, I’ve got a small handful of stories in my sock drawer … not that I’ll never think of going back to them, but if so, it will probably be a ground-up rewrite harvesting the manuscript for whatever good ideas I’ve got. But I also have a larger tranche of stories I haven’t quite given up on yet, ones I think I can salvage, but which aren’t as important as my novels.

But if I’m not working on them, are they in the sock drawer, or not? Some of those stories went out to a dozen or more places and got as many rejections. Others I sent to one or two places, or nowhere. And if I read them again, what would I think? Is it worth going back to them? If it’s a choice between working on Dakota Frost, Cinnamon Frost, Jeremiah Willstone, or Serendipity the Centaur, I’m going to choose one of them over a short story I wrote back in 2001.

So why am I digging back at the boundary of Stalled and the Sock Drawer?

Recently, a friend told me about a short story submission deadline that was closing fast. I looked at my list of stories I’ve sent out to find one to send … but I’ve gotten much better at sending out my work, so, surprisingly, I didn’t have anything to send. So I had a choice: let the deadline pass … or find my best unpublished story and send it out.

I actually do have 2 or 3 stories on my shortlist of “this story is really good, but it never made it” but I want to edit these before I send them out again, so I thought about letting the deadline pass. Then I realized that if I never go back to those stories, I might as well consider them dead. I always mean to revise them - I have a folder of comments and notes on them - but somehow I never get around to it. So I needed to commit: lob the lot into the sock drawer, or take action.

I found the best of these that fit within the word count limits of the magazine. Then I reformatted it according to William Shunn’s manuscript guidelines, to give it the best chance for success. The very act of reformatting it gave me a new eye on the story … and I realized that inside that 10,000 word manuscript was a great 8,000 word story screaming to get out.

I didn’t have time to make those changes before the deadline. I did a quick edit, I fixed a few minor warts … and I sent it out.

If they like it, hopefully by the time they get back to me, I’ll have a great edit ready.

If not … I’ll have a great edit ready for someone else.

In the meantime, I added a tick to the count of Circulating Stories in the following graph...

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… and blogging about it added a tick to this graph:

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Since I’ve seen, and done the alternative … sitting on stories forever ... I think this is was the “write" thing to do.

-the Centaur

Best Laid Plans Sometimes Must Be Set Aside

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So I started off this year with all sorts of big plans - blogging every day, hitting the ground running at work - and it’s kind of funny to stumble so close to the starting gate. I missed blogging yesterday, and I missed today at work entirely due to bleah.

But things happen for a reason, I think; the world looks deterministic and impersonal down at the level of the laws of physics, but there’s a structure to it at a higher level which, if not real, is at least something we can take advantage of.

Case in point one: I’ve been pushing hard to finish a revision to the first chapters of my novel, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but it’s slow going as I’ve had to rethink my whole approach to the book. Digging through my other Jeremiah material for inspiration, I found an almost-finished novella, which my obssessive-compulsive tendencies sucked me into trying to finish. (Procrastinating on one project with another project is worth further discussion, I think, but that’s another blogpost for another time, if I haven’t already blogged on it, that is). But I made myself stop after I took a pass, and tried to tackle my daily blogpost.

At which point a friend dropped by to talk. I was at Coupa Cafe, a hot spot for great Venezuelan coffee and Silicon Valley’s startup culture, which isn’t just about startups, but is actually a hotbed for intellectual discussion. In thirty short minutes, my buddy and I dove far into the intricacies of deep learning, something which affects me a lot at work - and just as that was winding down, one of his other friends dropped in, and started quizzing me about the mathematics in my urban fantasy novels. Turns out he’s an expert in precisely the same areas of mathematics that my young protagonist Cinnamon Frost is - so I see more conversations in our future.

Definitively, that conversation was worth more than the schedule of my blogposts, so it was the right thing to do to fully engage with the human beings right in front of me rather than sticking mechanically to my plan. It’s really important to take advantage of these opportunities and to capitalize on them when they happen. That’s what this world is structured for.

Now, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to capitalize on catching my wife’s flu and waking up feeling like someone pummeled me with a half ton of bricks, but I’m sure there’s some lesson or opportunity in there. At least I … uh, dunno, got to drop off my dry cleaning on my way to the local restaurant for some hot chicken soup? Not sure what’s the lesson in there. (Though it’s probably a sign that I need to sit down with my laptop and catch up on writing documentation, which I can easily do from home).

-the Centaur

Welcome to 2016

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Hi, I’m Anthony! I love to write books and eat food, activities that I power by fiddling with computers. Welcome to 2016! It’s a year. I hope it’s a good one, but hope is not a strategy, so here’s what I’m going to do to make 2016 better for you.

First, I’m writing books. I’ve got a nearly-complete manuscript of a steampunk novel JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE which I’m wrangling with the very excellent editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books. God willing, you’ll see this come out this year. Jeremiah appears in a lot of short stories in the anthologies UnCONventional, 12 HOURS LATER, and 30 DAYS LATER - more on that one in a bit.

I also have completed drafts of the urban fantasy novels SPECTRAL IRON and HEX CODE, starring Dakota Frost and her adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost, respectively. If you like magical tattoos, precocious weretigers, and the trouble they can get into, look for these books coming soon - or check out FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE, the first three Dakota books. (They’re all still on sale, by the way).

Second, I’m publishing books. I and some author/artist friends in the Bay Area founded Thinking Ink Press, and we are publishing the steampunk anthology 30 DAYS LATER edited by Belinda Sikes, AJ Sikes and Dover Whitecliff. We’re hoping to also re-release their earlier anthology 12 HOURS LATER; both of these were done for the Clockwork Alchemy conference, and we’re proud to have them.

We’re also publishing a lot more - FlashCards and InstantBooks and SnapBooks and possibly even a reprint of a novel which recently went out of print. Go to Thinking Ink Press for more news; for things I’m an editor/author on I’ll also announce them here.

Third, I’m doing more computing. Cinnamon Frost is supposed to be a mathematical genius, so to simulate her thought process I write computer programs (no joke). I’ve written up some few articles on this for publication on this blog, and hope to do more over the year to come.

Fourth, I’m going to keep doing art. Most of my art is done in preparation for either book frontispieces or for 24-Hour Comics Day, but I’m going to step that up a bit this year - I have to, if I’m going to get (ulp) three frontispieces done over the next year. Must draw faster!

Finally, I’m going to blog more. I’m already doing it, right now, but one way I’m trying to get ahead is to write two blog posts at a time, publishing one and saving one in reserve. This way I can keep getting ahead, but if I fall behind I’ve got some backlog to fall back on. I feel hounded by all the ideas in my head, so I’m going to loose them on all of you.

As for New Year’s Resolutions? Fah. I could say “exercise more, blog every day, and clean up the piles of papers” but we all know New Year’s Resolution’s are a joke, unless your name is Jim Davies, in which case they’re performance art.

SO ANYWAY, 2016. It’s going to be a year. I hope we can make it a great one!

-the Centaur

Pictured: The bookshelves of Cafe Intermezzo in the Atlanta airport, one place where I like to write books and eat food.

Some Years Are Better Than Others, Aren’t They?

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20151225_202334-ANIMATION.gif 1995 was one of the best years of my life: I got engaged, I published my first scientific paper, and I published my first short story. All that gave me a great feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment, but that happiness was short lived: that engagement ultimately disintegrated, my PhD dragged on, and I didn’t publish another short story for years. r1d1-vertical.jpg Now, there were great sparks in there - successive internships at CMU in Pittsburgh in 1996, SRI in the Bay Area in 1997 and Yamaha in Japan in 1998 - but I didn’t really start feeling great until 1999, when my thesis advisor started an internet startup with me and one of his graduate students - Enkia, my first taste of the inside of a healthy startup. e_400x400.jpg But the dotcom crash happened and everything got acrimonious (as things do when external factors turn sour, since people are no longer glossing over problems that didn’t bother them before) and my father grew gravely ill and we all agreed it was better to part ways, so that happy time evaporated too. I don’t even really have good pictures of this time, not digital ones. gigeresque_full.jpg The pattern repeats - ups and downs, good times and bad, a few really so-so jobs with really nice people, meeting my wonderful fiancee and having a terrible-post wedding experience with my mother, and so on, and so on. It’s really easy to focus on the bad, sometimes, to think of all the things that have gone wrong. 20150918_114445.jpg This year was no different: loss of the family matriarch, extreme disruption at work (I lost 2 SVPs, 2 directors, 2 bosses and 2 teams in the last year to other-than-normal churn) and the delay of my latest novel, the CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. But at the same time, I had a great novel published - LIQUID FIRE - found a wonderful new team, and had a great time with friends and family. 20151227_004919.jpg You know what? Crap happens. But wonderful things happen to. And the way that we choose to take things affects what we get out of them. If you focus on all the bad stuff, you may end up feeling like your life is in the shitter. But if you take the time out to appreciate the good things as they happen, to share them with friends and family, and to remember them … 20151212_203149.jpg … you might find everything really did turn out all right. 20151213_113525.jpg -the Centaur

FROST MOON On Sale on Amazon!

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Like magic? Like tattooing? Like werewolves? Like feisty magical tattoo artist fighting off a charming rogue werewolf suitor with a stick, while the two of them might just be prey to a serial killer targeting the magically tattooed? Well, if so, you are in luck, because the first book in the Dakota Frost, Skindancer series, FROST MOON, is now on sale on Amazon!

  • FROST MOON - werewolves and magic tattoos and serial killers, oh my! for $1.99
  • BLOOD ROCK - vampires and magic graffiti and magic arson, oh noes! for $4.61
  • LIQUID FIRE - dragons and firespinning and fire ninjas, my goodness! for $1.99

I’m hard at work at Book 4, SPECTRAL IRON, and Book 5, PHANTOM SILVER, and even a spinoff series starring Dakota Frost’s adoptive daughter, Cinnamon Frost, starting with the book provisionally titled HEX CODE. So if you read these, I plan on having a lot more where that was coming from! I hope you enjoy!

-the Centaur


Eight Hundred Fifty Thousand Words

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So another Nanowrimo draws to a close. The title says HEX CODE, but today’s writing was finishing out a few details in scenes in BOT NET (the second part of the Spellpunk trilogy manuscript I’m working on) and then a new beginning for ROOT USER (book 3). That new beginning, which played out a scene I’ve had in my head a long time, was very easy to write.

“That’s a damn shame,” says a distant voice, “so large an animal, in so small a cage.”


Muzzily, I grogs awake. What the fuck? Can’t they see I’m sleepin’? But then the words they’ve spoken starts to set in, balls in a Pachinko machine, rattlin’ in through the Pascal’s Triangle patterns in my brain to rack up a score of maximum annoyance.


The cage, you see, is large, for its type—a safety cage. Eight by thirty, made of elaborate wrought-iron vines, fashioned special from a welder we knows in Little Five Points, the safety cage is the largest and nicest I’ve ever been in—and the largest we could fit on our front porch.


The porch is big, and Southern, in front of a house big, and Southern, a third of the way down Fairview from Moreland, not three blocks from L5P. Pretty big even by Atlanta standards, but county code sez leave the front door unblocked, so thirty feet wide is was the cage limit.


Not that it feels limiting; there’s lamps and books and ferns and an ahw-SOOOME sectional sofa we found at an outdoor patio store, which stretches almost from the porch door on the left to the <regulation width with code #> stair down to my den.


It’s a full fourteen feet of sofa, fully twelve feet of it usable—which is a good thing, because stretched over it right now, covering just about its full length this very instant, is the enormous animal that the annoying interpopers have named.


Me.

That’s why the last day of Nano has that spike: let your inspiration flow!

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That brought me to over 65,000 words, the most I’ve done in Nano, as far as I know, ever:

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SO I have a new record to beat. But I also cracked 700,000 words on my spreadsheet … which means, since I’ve done Nano at least three times before, my total Nano total is 850,000 words.

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I feel pretty happy about that. Nano has brought so many creative ideas to the table, I can’t even begin to describe it. Easily a half dozen completely new ideas came to me this month - one even within the final writing session just before midnight tonight. I have to credit Nano for giving me this inspiration.

Now, onward to the next round of edits on THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE … and the 50,000 other projects I’ve been putting off, like my library … though I *might* take out a little time to play a video game, or, perhaps, read a book … you never know ...

-the Centaur

Giving Thanks for a Post-Nano Surge

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I normally take off the week of Thanksgiving to finish Nanowrimo, and if you look at the stack of seven hundred thousand words that I’ve written in Nanowrimos, you can see the surge there clearly. (I bet it would be even more clear if I only counted the November Nanos, but I’m doing this graph in Excel, not Mathematica or Processing or R, so sue me for laziness).


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But even so, it’s easy to see (if you are me) that I’m perilously close to beating my all time record for November, set in 2010 with THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE with 60,164 words. And there ARE four days of Nano left, so I just may keep pushing on. My record per day that I’ve kept records is over 7000 words (almost certainly the mad scramble to finish LIQUID FIRE in 2009 after getting edits on BLOOD ROCK early in the month), so that’s easily doable. And my average for these four days is close to 4000 words. One year I even made 5300 words today, on the 27th, so keep your fingers crossed.

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But as much as I like to take this week off - as much as antisocial me doesn’t want to accumulate obligations on my time, which I freely admit made the first half of this week miserable from the temporal anticipation - I really do enjoy hanging out with my friends and family, and even though I don’t get the chance to fly home to see my blood family over this holiday, I loved having the chance to get together at the house of my “brother from another mother” and his wife and to join them on their Thanksgiving.

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Family, friends, and good times aren’t the only important things in life. But they sure do make life a lot better.

-the Centaur

Getting it together

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What you see there is my "working stack" at home ... the piles of books for my most active projects. These include Dakota Frost (shelves to the left and right that you can't quite see), Cinnamon Frost (middle shelf on the right, middle center shelf and others below), robotics at work (top shelf on the right), Thinking Ink Press (bottom visible shelf on the right and middle center shelf), Lovecraft studies (middle center shelf and top shelf on the left you can't quite see), and general writing (above, below, all around). I accumulate lots and lots of books - too many, some people think - but there's a careful method to this madness, as most of these books are not recreational, but topical, filling out a library around things I'm trying to accomplish. This means that when I'm working on a problem on, say, a Cinnamon Frost novel, and get stumped, I can have the pleasant experience I had last night of glaring at a Wolfram MathWorld article, not finding all the info I needed, peering through the references ... and finding that the references pointed to a book I had on the topic, right in the Cinnamon shelf (pictured above). For a long time I was terrified of my own library. Well, not terrified, but I'd piled up and accumulated so much stuff that I couldn't effectively use it. This has been accumulating since the days of my condo in Atlanta, which was approaching near gravitational collapse, but I've made two major pushes to clean up the library since I moved to California, which organized it usefully, as I've reported on previously, and since then two major pushes to clean up the files. I've still got a lot go go - you can see more piles below - but now I've got a better system for organizing paper, I am starting to develop a system to get things out of the library and back to used bookstores (slowly, grudgingly, occasionally) and ... I actually find myself wanting to go in here again. The piles are still scary, but now I've got a nice reading area set up, which I can lean back and be cozy in... My current reading pile and art projects are intimidating, but now organized and useful and even attractive ... My cognitive science section has developed a cozy, hallowed feel, that makes me want to dig in more ... ... and at last I once again have a workspace which makes me want to sit down and work, or write: I can't tell you how healthy that feels. I need to stay on top of that. But for now ... time to get back to it. -the Centaur P.S. Yes, I do actually use all those computers and monitors, though the one on the far right is slowly getting replaced by the floating hoverboard of an iMac that is now struggling to supplant my MacBook Air as my primary computer (good luck, you'll need it). For reference, there's my ancient MacBook Pro on the left, which formerly served as my home server; the iMac that's replacing it, hovering over the desk, a MacBook Air which is my primary computer, and the secondary keyboard and monitor for my old Linux workstation, which is about to be replaced because it's not beefy enough for my experiments with ROS.

Overwhelmed

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So, wow, long time no post. What’s been up? Well, I’ve been busting my ass to finish the edits to JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which I finally sent back to Bell Bridge last Saturday at midnight. Then Sunday I finished up a pair of Jeremiah Willstone stories to the editors of THIRTY DAYS LATER, an upcoming anthology. Then on Monday I finished up writing up my comments on the audio version of LIQUID FIRE so Traci Odom could finish her reading. Then I joined a new team at work.

Phew.

This week, I’ve spent a little time cleaning up Dakota Frost #4, SPECTRAL IRON, but today, I started diving back into Cinnamon Frost #1, HEX CODE, for National Novel Writing Month. So, so much is going on I barely have time to blog. I hope to say more about all that’s going on shortly, but in case I don’t, I wanted to take a few moments out to fill you all in. Coming off the stress of all those projects has left me rattled - people ask how I’m doing, and I say “Fiiiine,” and have to clarify that yes, I am fine, but my body hasn’t yet adjusted to being in a situation that I’m fine, so I’m still feeling strung out. But objectively speaking, things ARE fine.

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So I rewarded myself with a nice dessert at dinner, and had fun at a truly epic haunted house with my wife.

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So all is right with the world. Sorry to be incommunicado for a while; More in a bit.
20151101_180704.jpg -the Centaur

Now THAT Was a Book Reading

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So my book reading at Books Inc in Mountain View happened, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. We had a lot of people show up - more than at first I thought - and there was a lot of positive energy from the people in the audience which made it easy to read. (Note: I took pictures before the event, but not during, because I was the speaker, and that would be just rude).

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I actually was less nervous and stuttery speaking to this crowd than I was when I was sitting alone in my great room reading the passages I had planned. The thing I'm happiest about, however, is that I planned what I was going to read deliberately.

Normally I read, by reflex, the first section of whatever new thing I've got. But sometimes the setup is not that interesting, so I've tried reading really exciting bits. But that doesn't seem to work either - people demand context.

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That led to a brainflash: I decided I should think not about what I wanted to read but what I wanted people to get out of the reading. I chose the first page and a half of FROST MOON to set the stage. At the last minute, I also decided to read a page and a half of BLOOD ROCK, filled with police, magic and vampires, to show progression in the world (and unabashedly to show off what I thought was a nice bit of writing). And then I chose to read the first half of a chapter out of LIQUID FIRE, tuning again at the last minute, to show off the action and adventure of "The Battle of Union Square." People seemed to love it - I even got applause.

What's more, the sequence of selections enabled me to talk about various aspects of the world I'd built - setting it in a time and place, making the action realistic, exploring consequences - and led into a really good Q&A session. Finally, I left a little time out to read the first chunk of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which also seemed to strike a chord. At the end, we had a line of people for signing, including one who bought a copy of the whole trilogy; many of those joined us for a victory dinner.

Wow. I am so happy that you all came, and that you all liked it. You really made my day. Thank you.

At first I thought just enough people showed up to fill half the seats, but I was wrong - there were actually many more people standing and watching who didn't sit down because they were late. I didn't see them because I was paying attention to the nearer audience, but I know this because some of them came up afterward to talk to me … and others took pictures and sent them to me.

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What a wonderful event. I want to send my sincere thanks to Alex, the whole staff of Books Inc, and the staff of the upstairs Cafe Romanza, who have not only made this a great experience for me, but also have made this environment one of the best places I know to sit down, to get some good coffee, and to find and read a good book - or to imagine and write one.

-the Centaur

Reading LIQUID FIRE at Books Inc

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So it's crept up upon me: the first author event for Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE, this Wednesday the 26th at 7pm at Books Inc!

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Well, as I recall, we had a small reading at Clockwork Alchemy, but this is the official premiere of the book! What's more wonderful is that this reading will be in the bookstore that hosts the cafe where a goodly chunk of LIQUID FIRE was written!

http://www.booksinc.net/event/anthony-francis-books-inc-mountain-view

Local author Anthony Francis shares his latest urban fantasy, Liquid Fire. Filled with spectacular magic, pyrotechnic action, and kinky romance, Liquid Fire is the action-packed third installment in the Dakota Frost, Skindancer series.

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I'll likely read a bit of FROST MOON to set context, then some of LIQUID FIRE, take questions, and finish up with a preview of something special coming soon!

So please drop in and support your local independent bookstore … and your favorite magical tattoo artist!

-the Centaur

The Centaur at Dragon Con

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So I'll be at Dragon Con this year, the convention I've attended the longest. It's where I sold my first book, it's where I've served on endless panels, it's where I'm an Eternal Member, of course, but this year, I'm a bit more: I'm an attending professional, which means I finally rate my own tiny, tiny little space in the program:

By day, Anthony Francis works on search engines and robots; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. He's the author of the Dakota Frost, Skindancer series including Frost Moon, Blood Rock, and Liquid Fire, and is the co-author of the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide.

And the really good news is, I'll be having a reading to celebrate the release of my latest novel, LIQUID FIRE, on Friday at 2:30PM! If you're a fan of Dakota Frost, you should definitely come by, because I'll read selections from LIQUID FIRE, answer questions, give away swag, and read preview versions of other future books in the series!

Title: Reading: Anthony Francis
Time: Fri 02:30 pm Location: Edgewood - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)

From my perspective, however, what's even more important is that because I'm an attending professional, I actually get to know my schedule in advance! (At least most of it!) That means I can not only show up at my panels with more than a minute's preparation, I can actually, like, tell you all about them! I'm tentatively scheduled to appear on three panels:

Title: Steampunk/Magepunk/Dieselpunk?
Description: Steampunk branches out! Tips for the market for the Punk genres.
Time: Sat 08:30 pm Location: Embassy D-F - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Lisa Mantchev, Stephen L. Antczak, Gail Z. Martin, Anthony Francis)

Title: Steampunk and the TARDIS
Description: Victoriana and retrofuturist Steampunk themes are popular in Doctor Who.
Time: Sun 05:30 pm Location: Augusta 1-2 - Westin (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Dr. Scott Viguié, Anthony Francis, That Darling DJ Duo, Ken Spivey)

Title: World Building, Part 2: The Multicultural Multiverse
Description: This Q&A covers the wide world beyond Britannia.
Time: Sun 07:00 pm Location: Augusta 3 - Westin (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Michael J. Martinez, Milton J Davis, Anthony Francis)

There's a chance I may be on a few more, but for that, stay tuned. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you at my reading!

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-the Centaur

From My Labors Rested

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Well, another Nano has come to an end. I've added over 50,000 words to the HEX CODE manuscript, succeeding at the month's 50K as of a few days ago, and last night I added the framework for the last few scenes that the revised story still needed, putting me way ahead of the game. Calling it done … for now, that is.

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It's interesting to compare this with previous months, as I did before. Even after the huge push near the end, I didn't quite catch up to the last time that I worked on HEX CODE. I must have been going gangbusters!

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I'd love to keep going, but I now see why in the past, whenever I hit the limit, my writing rate dropped off. By my calculations, I have five novels due over the next two years - one down into the final edits, one in rough draft, one (HEX CODE) almost complete, and two more in lesser stages of completion. So it's good to take a breather … after climbing the mountain.

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Now, back to CLOCKWORK ….

-the Centaur

Viiictory the Twelfth

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As of this afternoon, I have completed an additional 50,000 words on my Cinnamon Frost novel HEX CODE … making me an official winner of the Nanowrimo challenge twelve times. Woohoo!

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This was a good Nano, in that I stayed ahead of the game more than I thought I had. Even a couple of days I got physically sick helped me, as I holed up with my laptop and typed. Paradoxically, some of the best-feeling personal days I had this month I got no writing done at all. Yet, in the end, I managed to stay ahead, way ahead.

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But, while analyzing this data, I found out something else … I haven't tackled Nanowrimo twelve times with one failure; I've tackled it fourteen times. You see, I remembered all the times I tackled Nanowrimo in November, and all the times I tackled Camp Nanowrimo, and even Script Frenzy. But ever since 2009, I've kept day-to-day word counts, and I found at least one more time I've tried Nano, in December of 2010. I was apparently having so much fun with CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE that I decided to keep going. Putting all this data together revealed something very interesting: this hasn't been my best month at Nano.

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In a recent post, I said I thought I'd never been this consistently far ahead for this long, but was I wrong. Way wrong. In 2011, when I was tackling HEX CODE for the first time, I was so far ahead it's crazy: several thousand words ahead of my best times on all the other months. Apparently I was going gangbusters. This month was close, up till Friday and Saturday where I fell off a bit and then had to take a day of for writing business stuff, but today after writing 4,500+ words I ended up only 8,000 words ahead, but at this time in November of 2011 I was almost 13,000 words ahead.

Cinnamon is such a delightful character, it doesn't surprise me - though it does hurt your brain writing tens of thousands of words in broken English. Still, I'm really happy with how this book is developing. I realized, partway through this month, that this manuscript is actually the whole of the Spellpunk trilogy, and I reorganized it so the parts of #2 BOT NET and #3 ROOT USER were downstream of where I was writing, letting me focus on the story of HEX CODE #1, giving its own problems and climax. I think it's gone quite well, giving the story room to breathe, making certain events more rational because they can happen over time in a natural sequence … and giving Cinnamon even more time to shine.

I'll probably keep going on HEX CODE for a few more days making sure I core dump the rest of my story ideas, but then it will be back to editing THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE in time to send it to Debra, then revising SPECTRAL IRON in time to send it to beta readers, plus two stories for an upcoming anthology, then an essay, plus conference travel, oh finishing the Hugo reading and voting, plus that wedding, and wait shouldn't I pay my bills aaaaaa ….

It's a wonderful life. Back to it!

-the Centaur

Soaring on Thermals

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As you may be able to see above, I've managed to do something I don't recall having done ever in Nano: consistently stay ahead of the curve for the whole month to date. By my count, I'm almost 8% ahead of the game at the halfway point … over two full days.

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While there were a few days I didn't get any writing done, I was always ahead of the game, so I never fell behind … meaning the "Current Debt" column was always positive … meaning I'm always in the black. Huzzah!

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This is a good feeling, but there's slightly more to it than that. I made a discovery. I'm not actually writing HEX CODE.

I've been writing the whole damn SPELLPUNK trilogy.

As I wrote, the story kept getting bigger and more bloated, while at the same time it was missing something. Threads left out. Pieces which didn't quite fit. The magical computer virus of the title, the "hex code", appeared in strangely spotty ways. And there were all these other threads, threads about the Werehold, the new werekin home.

I was thinking through how to fit these things together, and then started to notice something. I always had three titles in mind for the SPELLPUNK trilogy: HEX CODE, BOT NET, and ROOT USER (originally the last two were swapped, but whaddya know). And then I noticed: the first part of the book deals with the "hex code", then later a "bot net" appears, then later, in the last part of the story … a "root user" appears.

Am I writing the whole trilogy? I asked myself. I pulled in the 700 words I'd written on the second novel. I reorganized some sequences. I started fleshing out more and more pieces. Finally, I allowed myself to write a sequence that I had considered dropping, when I thought I was writing just one young adult novel. But if this part of the book isn't a part of a book, but an entire book in and of itself, that sequence was needed, was logical, was even demanded …

And 1400 words immediately popped out of my pen. (Well, keyboard, but you know).

So I'm even further ahead than I expected, not just on this month's Nanowrimo thanks to this burst of creativity, but now on the next few years of my life. I knew I needed to get three books out in the next year - THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, HEX CODE, and SPECTRAL IRON - and five in the next two years - PHANTOM SILVER and one or more sequels. But now, I'm closer to the end of HEX CODE proper than I'd ever thought I'd be, I have a huge jump on the sequels, these books will all be shorter than the 150,000 word behemoths that I'd been turning into Debra … and they'll have an inter-book cohesion that I've never attempted before, but which falls out naturally from the nature of the story.

In short, the story gets to breathe … and so will I.

At least, that's the theory. I still have five novels due in the next two years. So, back to Nano. I have almost 22,000 words to finish for this month, after all. But now I'm not just flying above the mountain; I'm soaring above it, rising on thermals to new heights. Now, beyond what I have due, I also have a ray of hope - and a plan for success.

Onward!

-the Centaur

Reading the Manual after Jumping from the Plane

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Still plugging away at HEX CODE. But even in the middle of Nanowrimo, when I'm desperate to make my word count before my upcoming adventures, even when I have a good feel for what needs to happen in the next scene … it still helps to do research. Above you see a pile of books fairly typical for working on Cinnamon Frost stories, plus one recreational one (I'll leave it to you to figure out which one from the negative space of the context) and here's how they have helped me. For those just joining us, Cinnamon Frost is a teenage weretiger with Tourette's Syndrome who grew up basically on the streets, and ...

  • Chelsea Cain's "Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture" helped me get in touch with something entirely outside my experience … growing up as a teenage weretiger in essentially a werekindred commune.
  • Brooks Landon's "Building Great Sentences" audio course (of which I have the printed notes above) reminded me to keep vary the patterns in my sentences, which helps me (in my terms) "solve problems" as I try to deliver the information I need to keep the plot moving while maintaining the right rhythm.
  • Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf" also helped me get in touch with the experiences that someone in a marginalized community might have, though I wasn't able use this idea in today's writing session, it might come up soon.
  • Patrick Newman's "Tracking the Weretiger" is just damn fascinating, and is helping me flesh out the plot of the rest of the "Dakota Frost, Skindancer" / "Cinnamon Frost, Spellpunk" / "Quarry" series.
  • The Jesus Seminar's "The Parables of Jesus" is helping me flesh out the moral dimensions of the story, by deriving the moral stances of the more "heroic" characters from the more "authentic" parables (at least, according to the Seminar) and deriving the stances of the more morally gray characters from the more "questionable" parables. Of course, all Scripture is profitable for instruction … but some parts of it do seem to get Jesus's message more on point than others, and by assigning a spectrum of goodness to different characters I get to play with a lot of interesting moral conundrums.
  • Mitzi Waltz's Tourette's Syndrome: "Finding Answers & Getting Help" is also useful for helping me portray the subtle aspects of Tourette's Syndrome, which Cinnamon suffers from, but which is notoriously difficult to portray correctly without it devolving into caricature. It has given me new plot ideas for the whole book and actually makes some of Cinnamon's weird behavior seem much more understandable, but I need to work it in.

As for the last book, for now it's fun, but who knows, she's a math genius, so maybe it will work in.

I didn't read all of these over lunch, but I got a chapter or a half dozen pages of each, and as a consequence: I found out some interesting other conditions people might suffer from, gave them to a character, creating an instant conflict, and gave Cinnamon a new coping tool, leading to more conflict.

Easily three to five hundred words popped out of today's salsa of reading, putting me way ahead:

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I'm doing my level headed best to not rest on my laurels though, as I have a LOT more to go:

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Still climbing that mountain. Still reading the manual as falling out of the plane. Still writing 1666+ words a day.

Onward!

-the Centaur

Climbing the Mountain Again

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Well, I haven't finished editing THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE in June like I wanted to, but it's now July, and I'm out of time. So it's back to another Nano challenge, the Camp nano challenge for July, in which I'll write 50,000 words of the Cinnamon spin-off novel, HEX CODE.

After much struggling, I have come to accept that this Cinnamon Frost novel, which comes between Book 4 and Book 5 of the Dakota Frost series, can go nowhere else other than between Book 4 and Book 5. if HEX CODE had happened before Book 4, SPECTRAL IRON, the story would collapse: Dakota could solve the problem with one phone call, if that, and my 150,000 word book would collapse to a 30,000 word novella. Same thing with PHANTOM SILVER: if HEX CODE hadn't happened immediately before Book 5, half the plot would collapse, and I'd need to contrive reasons to do things which are completely natural.

But I still owe THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE to Debra sometime before the end of August for the book to come out this year, and I still need to get SPECTRAL IRON to Debra by January 31st of 2016 so it can come out in 2016, and PHANTOM SILVER to her by January of 2017 so it can come out in 2017 … which means HEX CODE needs to be done in the middle of 2016 so we can get that book out between Books 4 and 5. That means I need to write something like 50,000 to 100,000 words in the next six months, and edit the draft, and send it to beta readers, and edit it again, all on top of everything else I'm doing.

I sure do live in interesting times.

But I'm done with my word count for today, so I'll be diving back into CLOCKWORK for the rest of tonight. And I've got a long weekend coming up, with all next week off leading into Comic-Con, with no responsibilities for Comic-Con itself this year (thank God) other than showing up and having fun, so … perhaps this is going to work out.

Oh, right, an excerpt! I think that's safe in this case. From today's first draftiness:

I tenses up. I knows where this is going.

“I,” Mom says, whapping my leg, “am not my mother. I remember fighting monsters and wizards with you. You are reckless and amazing, and I’d love to say you can definitely take care of yourself … but I also remember you’ve been kidnapped, and you nearly set the city on fire.”


“Yes, Mom,” I says. “Sorry, Mom.”


“You are not formally grounded,” Mom says. “But I don’t want you going on a run—”


“Aww, man,” I says.


“—don’t want you going on a run until the situation and your vitals are more stable,” Mom says, pointing at the heartbeep machine. “Not until we can get more security for the house, and coordinate a plan to keep you safe away from the house—”


“Aww, Mom,” I says, “that spoils it. I gotta run by myself—”


“You run with Tully,” Mom says. “You ran with hunts at the werehouse. Did any of that spoil it? Look, Cinnamon, I’m not stupid. I will find out if you have snuck out … but I can’t stop you from sneaking out. You’re an experienced and stealthy street tiger who can turn invisible, and I’m a weak mortal human who needs to sleep. You will get out if you want to. But we’re in a difficult and terrible situation in which our friends are literally exploding and you were attacked so hard it put you in the hospital. All I ask is that you not go for a run until you heal up and the situation calms down, and that if, God forbid, you’re crawling the walls so much you can’t stand it, find a friend from the werehouse and go on a run with a partner.”


I set my lip. I wants to run free. I can outrun anybody. I wants to run free.


“Fine,” I says at last, fuming. But I’m really smart … and I’ve seen the escape hatch.


Mom stares off in the distance. “I know you’re really smart, so I want you to think about what our friend Special Agent Philip Davidson would call operational security. Think about what you can do to make it hard on the bad guys. Change your time, change your route, run with a friend or even a whole hunt—and text me your location. I promise not to freak. In fact, if you’ve done something bad and you need my help, I want you to say that. Tell me, “don’t freak”—but tell me, or I swear to God I am going to ground you until the heat death of the universe.”

Only 48,000 words left for the month of July. Onward!

-the Centaur

Send Out Your Work

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Robert Heinlein famously had five rules for writing:

  1. Write.
  2. Finish what you start.
  3. Refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
  4. Put your story on the market.
  5. Keep it on the market until sold.

with Robert Sawyer's addendum's: #6: "Start working on something else."

Now, like all writing rules, these have limits. Take #3. Some authors write near-finished pieces on a first draft, but most don't. I've done that with a very few short pieces, but most of my pieces are complex enough to require several rewrites. As you get better and better at writing, it becomes easier and easier to produce an acceptable story right off the bat … so see rule #6.

Actually, there's a lot between rules #2 and #4. I revise a story until I feel it is ready to send to an editor … then I send it to beta readers instead, trusted confidants who can deliver honest but constructive criticism. When I feel like I've addressed the comments enough that I want to send it back to the betas, I don't; I send the story out to market instead.

Regardless, some stories won't ever sell. Many writers have a "sock drawer" of their early work (and many markets ask you not send them socks). Trying to read my first Lovecraft pastiche, "Coinage of Cthulhu," causes me a jolt of almost physical pain. Other stories may be of an unusual length or type, and for a long odd-genre story is indeed possible to exhaust all possible markets.

So what should you do with your odd socks? Some authors, like Harlan Ellison, are bold enough to share their very early work; other authors, like Ernest Hemingway, threw away ninety nine pages for each one published. Gertrude Stein reportedly shared her notebooks almost raw; Ayn Rand reportedly rewrote each page of Atlas Shrugged five or six times. So there's no right answer.

But again, it isn't that simple. I recently have been reviewing my work, and while I do have a few stories likely destined for the sock drawer, and a few stories which definitely need revision, there are others that I have never sent out, especially after a low point during graduate school when I got some particularly unhelpful criticism.

Many writers are creatures with delicate, butterfly-like egos … yet you need to develop an elephant's hide. Hemingway once said talking too much about the writers craft could destroy it, literally like brushing the scales off a butterfly's wing; John Gardner said he'd seen far too many promising writers crushed by one too many rejections.

When a good editor (*cough* Debra Dixon, ℅ Bell Bridge Books) hits you with hard criticism on a story, she's not trying to crush your ego: she's trying to tell you that this character isn't fleshed out, or the logic breaks down, or the story is dragging - or moving too fast. But not everyone's a good editor. Not everyone's even a good critic.

I've encountered far too many critics who can't critique constructively: critics who try to be clever by turning legitimate comments into deadly bon mots; critics who try to change the story by questioning your purpose, genre or style, critics who have their own ax to grind, including one who sent me a diatribe about why I should throw out my television.

And there are friendly critics, critics who never say anything bad about your story. Some people would say you should ignore them, but I disagree. First, you need a cheerleader to feed that delicate ego you're sheltering within that elephant's hide; second, if even your ever chipper cheerleader doesn't like a particular story, you better sit up and take notice.

But the stories in my low point weren't like that. Many of them got good internal reviews, and I was happy with them, but they were long, or slipstream, and I couldn't find markets for them. Or I was too tied up with the idea of high-paying SFWA markets. Or, more honestly, I just got busy and short shrifted them. But that opens up the question: how deep into my backlog do I go?

For me, answering these questions usually involves creating an Excel spreadsheet :-) which you see above. Clearly there was a low point in the data where I wasn't submitting anything, and I was going to spin a story of how I got discouraged … but a closer analysis tells a different story.

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The dates are approximate here, but mapping a sliding window over cumulative submissions, we can see a pattern where I started writing shorts, then had a first sale, followed by a burst of creativity on the heels of that encouragement. After a while, I got more and more discouraged, hitting rock bottom when I stopped sending shorts out at all … but this is only short story data.

Actually, I was working on a novel as well.

Before my first sale, "Sibling Rivalry", I'd written a novel, HOMO CENTAURIS. That burst of creativity of shorts came in graduate school, when I deliberately didn't want to take on another novel-length project. I did get discouraged, but at the same time, I started a novel, DELIVERANCE, and finished another two novels, FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK.

FROST MOON sold right when my short story writing was picking up again. It feels like I quit, but the evidence shows that I slowly and steadily sold stories both to open markets and to invited anthologies until very recently - and that there are as many stories circulating now as I was selling earlier.

So, maybe some of these will make it. Maybe they won't. But the data shows that feeling discouraged is pointless - my biggest sales came after my longest stretch of doggedly sending stories out. My karate teacher once said that most of your learning is on the plateau - you feel stuck, but in reality you're learning. The data seems to bear that out.

So if I had to redo Heinlein's rules, they'd go something like this:

  1. Write.
  2. Keep writing.
  3. Finish what you start.
  4. Circulate your work to get feedback.
  5. Edit your work to respond to that feedback.
  6. Send your edited work out to the markets.
  7. Don't wait to hear back … start writing something else right away.
  8. Keep circulating your work until sold, or you've exhausted all the markets.
  9. No matter what happens, keep writing.
  10. And never, never, never give up.

Time to practice what I preach …

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...and put more stories out on the market.

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-the Centaur

P.S. Axually, I'm doing a step not listed above … responding to editorial feedback on CLOCKWORK. Responding to feedback is explicit on Heinlein's list as #3, but an implicit consequence of #8 on mine. If you sell something, listen to your editor, but keep a firm grip on your own vision. That's hard enough it needs its own article.

Taking Stock

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What you see above are (almost) all the author's copies I have of all the published fiction I've written. Why am I taking stock of all this now? Well, at Clockwork Alchemy, this happened:

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I sold many, many other copies of my books and a solid dozen copies of FROST MOON - nearly cleaning out my stock of my first novel. I'd ordered twenty when LIQUID FIRE came out, but between that dozen, a few for a shelf at work, and a box that I sent to BayCon, I was left with just two of them. Time to order more.

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I'm in the writing game for the long haul, so I generally order 20-30 copies of any book or anthology that my work is published in (less or more if the publisher has a deal on sending a specific amount). Generally, north of 20 is a good number - I just sold out of 20 FROST MOON, but it can take a few years to sell out of 30 copies of an anthology. Your mileage may vary.

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Along with the books are piles of swag, postcards, t-shirts and various display materials which I organize into boxes so they can easily be taken to conventions. After several iterations of this, I've grown to keeping the stock in one big box, the swag in another box, keeping an empty "useful box" for extra copies on the first day of a convention (or a few copies for a smaller event like a signing) and all the oversized books and display materials needed at a full table in another box.

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This way if I want to go to a con, I can just grab a couple boxes and go. If I want to go to a con where I've got a table, everything I need is in just a couple more boxes, all of which fit in a couple shelves (more or less) in one bookcase.

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For a local con where I have a table, like Clockwork Alchemy, I go all out, so I need a couple more boxes of props, a display stand, and some tablecloths and an antique easel on loan from my wife. But the results, I think, are impressive.

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At least, thanks to my helpful assistants (thanks!) ...

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… it helped me sell a lot of books, and hopefully, make a lot of new fans.

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Time to order more FROST MOON …

-the Centaur

Clockwork Alchemy in Transit

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No time to blog this proper - things are moving too fast. But here's a flyover of Clockwork Alchemy in pictures.

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There's an awesome dealer's room … with droolworthy clothes (not my size, or it would be mine):

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There's an awesome art show, with epic props and artwork:

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And I do mean epic:

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There are amazing costumes of all kinds ...

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... with bleedover from Fanime and Baycon:

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There's an awesome Author's Salon organized by the redoubtable volcano lady, T.E. MacArthur …

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... and featuring alternate historian Harry Turtledove, Madeline Holly-Rosing of the Boston Metaphysical Society, Kaja & Phil Foglio of Girl Genius ...

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... and me!

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Many people at Thinking Ink Press helped out, either getting materials together prior to the con or helping out at the table ...

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… and we managed to make many fans happy by bringing them LIQUID FIRE!

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… and much more! For the very first time … someone bought the first Skindancer trilogy as a bundle!

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Let's end on that happy note, and I'll have more tales of the con soon! One more day to go...

-the Centaur