Posted on
by

How to Promote Yourself as a Writer Without Being Obnoxious
M.K. Hobson, Jess Hartley, Lizzy Shannon, Alma Alexander
OryCon 33
  • Alma: Publishers want you to be out there everywhere. Facebook, Twitter, Blogging.
  • Lizzy: Make the mistake of dressing as a Klingon to promote her first book. Big flop.
  • Jess Hartley
  • Hobson: Since I write historical fiction of a given period, costuming helps, because there is a common interest
  • When it comes to promotion, how much does what you write or what you do, drive what you do or don’t do in terms of promotion?
    • There is a different between promoting yourself as a writer as opposed to a book. Promoting yourself is good. You want people to remember your name. 
  • Alma: I am a shy person who would crawl under a table at parties, but if you put me in a position where I can talk about words and writing, that I can do. I can put myself in a discussion or at a talk.
  • Making yourself memorable, but not in a bad way.
    • A careless word or an off day.
  • We all have off days, but if you alienate someone who could have been a great fan by being rude, you can ruin that relationship – turn them against you.
  • On the other hand, sometimes you need to seperate the person from the book. You don’t have to agree with everything about an author to enjoy their book.
  • Internet things never go away. 
    • If you argue with someone, even in a small discussion forum somewhere, the next thing you know it could be on reddit.
    • Anne Rice alienated many of her readers when she responded to one online saying that person was too dumb to understand it when they complained about it.
  • Sometimes you get an author who bullies you into buying a book. But that doesn’t create a fan who is going to be excited about blogging about the author.
  • The camera is always on. 
  • If there’s a community of interest, don’t go there to promote your book. Go there to participate. Be part of the conversation. 
  • Devil’s Advocate: There’s an author, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their self-published ebook. He promotes shamelessly, all the time, everytime he talks to anyone. “have you read my latest book?” So what does this say about the “not being obnoxious” principle?
    • My goal is to build a readership and to give value to the community and build a lifetime career. I want to build something that will sustain. If he stops promoting, is there a community that will still push his sales forward? Maybe not.
  • Hobson: I’m concerned that I’ve created a certain kind of persona geared toward my genre fiction. Is it going to be a problem moving into a new genre?
    • Lizzy: I have several things in different genre, but they all have a common Irish theme.
    • Alma: I don’t like being typecast. I don’t want to get jaded and bored, and find that it’s a chore to churn out something new. So I am not going to write the same kind of book again.
    • Jess: I’ve seen authors who are writing erotica and who have highly sexual branding, and it becomes a limiting factor that makes it hard for them to move outside that.
  • What is the most helpful thing you’ve ever done, and what’s been the biggest bust?
    • Alma: I had a bunch of tiny little postit notes that promote my book. They are really popular. I give them away at cons. They are wildly successful. By lunch they are all gone.
    • Lizzy: A book launch party or a party at your house to promote your book. People come in and they buy the book. 
    • Jess: Making myself be outgoing, introducing myself to people. Asking people questions. Being interested in what they have to say.
      • What seems good but isn’t it: I’ve seen people putting their books on flash drives. But there’s no way I am going to put an unknown flash drive on my computer. It’s a wonderful theoretical idea, but in practice, no way.
      • Audience comment: bring coupon codes for your books. It’s easy to Smashwords.
    • Hobson: 
      • Bust
        • Sticky notes and things like that don’t work for me. I lose them or forget to deploy them.
        • I hate talking about my own work.
        • Don’t ever include food items. Chocolates that melt, things that rot.
        • Never, ever put glitter in an envelope of any kind. Glitter goes everywhere and they are going to hate you forever.
  • Q: How do you measure if something in successful?
    • Alma: Stickynotes are not just a little card. They are a whole block of cards with the book staring at you. 
    • Hobson: Something you can measure and get metrics on. Coupon codes are something you can track. You can calculate an ROI. But most writers don’t have the time or energy to go to that depth. But it’s a good thing to do.
    • Jess: Use Google analytics to track hits. I can see things get retweeted, reblogged, etc. 
    • Hobson: Finding places where you can be involved but it’s not directly about writing. Stuff you are really interested in. 
    • Jess: If you can get someone else to talk about your work, that has 10x the impact of you talking about it yourself. Maybe that can be cross promotion. Maybe thats who you meet at conventions. 

Posted on
by

Self Publish Write Now
Robert Plamondon
OryCon 33
  • You have options
    • You can write fan-fiction, and put it in book form, and as long as you don’t offer it for sale to the public, you haven’t violated anything.
    • Or if you wrote a book and it’s gone out of print. I sent a copy of the original book, and they cut the spine off, scan the pages, and it’s identical to the original.
    • Or if you write a novel, and every publisher in America rejects it twice.
  • Why would you do this and how?
    • Everyone values the printed book. It’s prestigous.
    • There’s the possibility of money.
    • If not money, other possibilities. First job out of high school was the result of a book that he had printed.
    • Publishing is a glamour industry. So it’s got to look good.
  • The interior is a PDF file printed on a black and white printer.
  • The cover is full cover with a plastic coating.
  • It’s printed much indistinguishable from a traditionally printed and published.
  • All the print on demand guys use acid-free preservation papers. It is better than what you get with publishers.
  • If you can make it look good as an 8.5×11, you can adjust the page size and margins and have it look good at 6×9.
  • Choose a robust font. Like 11pt Georgia.
    • Something like Caslon is too lightweight and feathery. 
  • Microsoft Word has pretty good typography. 2003 is actually considered to be the best.
  • Then you upload it to Createspace. They run some checks. Then you order a proof copy. After you approve the proof, it will show up on Amazon within a few hours.
  • You have a choice of public or private. 
    • If you don’t own the rights, you can’t do it publicly.
  • Q: If you want to tie together the Kindle version and the print version, can you do that?
    • Yes, definitely. You can do it through the tools. And even if you screw it up, Amazon has real customer support people. Hit the contact us button, and someone will fix it for you.
  • You can republish stuff that’s in the public domain.
  • If you want to get into bookstores, it can happen by a big publisher. Or by you going into a bookstore and getting them it order it for you via ISBN. 
  • Lightning Source
    • Is a bare knuckle, serious sort of publishing thing these days. It’s probably better to stick with Createspace.
  • It’s far easier to sell non-fiction than fiction. 
  • Recommended books
  • Covers
    • You can use the cover designer and get a pretty good design
    • You can use images from the government which are mostly all in the public domain and are all free.
      • hubble space telescope photos
      • photos of asteroids
      • great for any 
      • national archives photos are all free
      • patent illustrations are available
    • 300 pixels per inch is the standard you need for images
    • stock photo services
    • Even art is relatively cheap: a professional done fantasy art cover was $125 from an artist friend.
  • Q: How can you do images in the text?
    • A PDF file can have images and text.
    • Grayscale can be a little iffy. The printers they print them on are optimized for text. 
    • You can pay for color interiors, which are designed for art books, and look great – but cost about 5x per page.
    • Line art usually comes out great.
  • Createspace has a pro plan, which drops the cost per book, for a fixed fee per year per book.
  • Q: If you do Lightning Source, can you also sell it through Amazon?
    • Yes, but it probably makes sense to just do Createspace because then you have better availability on Amazon.
    • The one thing Lightning Source is essential for is if you need to scan an existing print book to do a facsimile reproduction.
  • Be generous when you have it: it’s rewarding to give away fan-fiction books.
  • He republished out of print books
    • As an author you can only write so many books
    • As an editor/publisher, you can do 10x as much material in a year
  • Everything published before 1968 is in the public domain if it hasn’t been renewed. Stanford has a copyright renewal database. You can check on books that have expired.
    • There’s a ton of stuff written back in the forties and fifties which is still modern knowledge and useful stuff. It’s highly relevant to current times.
  • Q: To become a publisher, what did you have to do?
    • You don’t need a business license if you are not a retailer.
    • You probably just need a D.B.A. (doing business as) to cash checks with your bank.
    • I have a class C corporation, which creates more paperwork.

Posted on
by

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Petra Mitchell, Amy Thomson, Daniel H. Wilson, David W. Goldman
OryCon 33
  • Do we have the right to turn off an artificial intelligence?
  • Amy: Buddhist definition of sentience is it is able to suffer?
  • Mitchell: Can you turn it off and turn it back on again? Humans can’t be turned on.
  • Wilson: If you’ve got an AI in a box, and it’s giving off signs that it’s alive, then it’s going to tell you what it wants.
  • In Star Trek, Data has an on/off switch. but he doesn’t want people to know about it.
  • If IBM spends 3/4 of a billion dollars making an AI, can they do anything they want with it?
  • Parents have a lot of rights over their children, but a lot of restrictions too.
  • AI isn’t simply going to arise on the internet. IBM is building the most powerful supercomputer on the planet to achieve it. It’s not going to be random bits. 
  • Evolutionary pressure is one way to evolve an artificial intelligence.
  • We can use genetic algorithms. We’re going to have algorithms compete, we’re going to kill the losers, we’re going to force the winners to procreate. If we were talking about humans, this would be highly unethical.
    • So where to draw the boundary?
    • Daniel: You are being God. You’ve defined the world, you raise a generation, they generate their answers, they’ve lived their life.
  • There may be people who will become attached to illusionary intelligences – like Siri – that isn’t a real intelligence. This will happen long before anything is really intelligent emerges.
  • Turing Tests
    • The [something] prize happens every year. Each year they get a little closer. A higher percentage of people believe the chatbot is human. 
    • It’s reasonable to believe that in ten years, it won’t be possible to distinguish.
  • Other ethical issues besides suffering:
    • If you have an AI, and you clone it, and then you have two that are conscious, then you shut one off – did you kill it?
  • How do you build robots that will behave ethically?
    • Not how do we treat them, but how do they treat us?
  • Now we have issues of robots that are armed and operating autonomously. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. 
  • We already have autonomous robots on military ships that defends against incoming planes and missiles. And back in the 1970s, it shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 300 passengers. 
  • When the stock market tanks, who’s fault is it? The AI? The humans? It happens faster than the humans can react.
  • Neural nets are black boxes. Decision trees are more obvious.
  • Asimov spent most of his time writing stories about how defining laws didn’t work.
  • We can’t simply say “Don’t kill humans”.
  • We have dog attacks, but we don’t ban dogs.
  • Tens of thousands die every year in car accidents, but we don’t eliminate cars.
  • We’ll put up with a lot of loss if we get benefit.
  • Japan is desperately trying to come up with robotic nursing aides because they don’t have enough people to do it.
    • Thomson: a robot nursing aide is an abomination. these people are lonely.
    • Wilson: if the alternative is no care, or inferior care.
    • What happens when someone leaves their robot a million dollars?
  • What happens when the robot butlers of the world, incredibly successful, and deployed everywhere, all go on strike?
    • Wilson: you design the hardware so it can’t do that.
  • If you are designing a robotic pet dog, you have an obligation to design it so it responds like a dog and inspires moral behavior because you don’t want kids to grow up thinking you can mistreat your dog, stick it in the microwave, etc.
  • Questions
    • Q: The internet developing sentience. How would we recognize that it is sentient?
      • It’ll be exhibiting obvious behavior before we get there.
    • Q: The factory of Jeeves. What if we have a factory of lovebots. And one lovebot says “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
      • There was a huge number of women in the south who objected to slavery because their husbands slept with the slaves. There will be lots of opposition to lovebots. 
      • It would be a great story to have a lovebot show up at a battered women’s shelter.
    • Q: The benefits accrued to a different party: the nursing robots may not be loved by the patients, but they will be loved by the administrators. 
    • Q: You have billions of dollars being poured into autonomous trading systems. They are turning them over every year. Evolutionary pressure to make better and better systems. 

Posted on
by

Using Social Media To Get Published
Cat Rambo, (Mary) M.K. Hobson, Mary Rosenblum / Mary Freeman, Chris Lester
OryCon 33
  • For a new writer, who is just getting started out, is it important to be on social media?
    • Cat: Yes and no. If they are just getting started, they don’t need to be broadcasting. But they need to be following editors and agents and more experienced writers. They can get the relationships that will get them published.
    • Hobson: Social media is like an online con that never ends. You need to be fostering those connections. Don’t be annoying, needy, etc.
    • Lester: What does publishing mean to you, and why do you care?
      • If it means a major deal with one of the big six and your book in Barnes and Noble, then it probably isn’t going to help.
      • If it means that tens of thousands of people are accessing your content and enjoying it, then yes, it can really help.
      • If you are dependent on NY publishing, then you are dependent on an archaic system that does have nothing to do with whether someone is successful or not.
    • Mary: Yes, you need to do it. If you’re only goal is major publisher, it will help somewhat. Some publishers will notice that. But it’s not that big of a deal. But if you are coming to any publisher with a established fanbase, that makes you eminently more publishable. 
      • Plus, if no agent or editor will pick you up, now you are positioned to self-publish.
      • Someone I work with, her first week she sold 1,000 books. That’s damn good.
  • How to use social media?
    • I’m seeing a lot of very ineffective use. How do we do it well?
    • Set up your accounts so that when you tweet, it goes to your Facebook.
    • When you read something you like, tell the writer. Social media makes that easier.
    • Hobson: Look at some examples
      • John Scalzi: Old Man’s War. He put it out onine, it got a great reception, and then was picked up by a publisher.
      • Cory Doctorow puts all his stuff online.
      • When I started, the conventional wisdom was put nothing online.
      • Now that may be turning around. You can put stuff online and build a readership.
    • Lester: 
      • Scott Stigler: Put out a bunch of different books in podcast form. Had five or six of them. Finally got his first book deal. Bidding war between two publishers.
        • By the time the book came out, the publisher was very heavily invested in it, and really pushed it.
        • And he had a big fan base.
        • And yet, he still made far more money from his other self-published series.
      • Tim Pratt does short stories – and podcasts of them. The podcast spreads everywhere in the social media world. Everyone knows his name.
      • You can expect 5% of the people who take something for free to actually pay for it.
  • The Giveaway
    • Mary: If you have a short story that you’ve tried with the big publishers, and they’ve rejected it, put it online. It will do more for you that way than shopping it around to smaller publishers.
    • Lester: Give away the first book free. 
      • People are drawn to production values: It has to look like someone cared about this, and put their time and money into it.
      • Then for the next book, put the book for sale up front. Then give away the book, a chapter a month. There will be plenty of people want to know what happens next, and they’ll pay to get that book.
  • You have to have a good product. Pay for a proofreader. Pay for an editor. Make sure it is good. People won’t pay for it if it isn’t. 
    • The reason you only get a $1.40 out of your $14 book from a NY publisher is because they are paying for a proofreader and an editor.
  • Make sure you understand the difference between a content editor, a copy editor, and a proof reader. Don’t hire one person to do it all.
    • $1 – $1.50/page.
    • $1000 for a book.
    • 2-5 cents per word.
    • a content editor or development editor is looking at structure, asking for revisions.
    • a copy editor is looking for logical errors, checking facts, checking language.
    • a proof reader is checking for typos, dropped words, commas in the right place.
  • What are you putting there social media?
    • Cat Rambo writes historical fiction. People who read historical fiction will be interested in historical articles, period costumes, etc.
    • Social media has to be authentic. It doesn’t have to be all of you. But it has to be real.
      • There’s an entire industry in silicon valley to try to fake authenticity. Big business doesn’t get it.
      • You have to be able to give up some privacy and some stuff about you to build the relationships so that you can be followers.
      • Think about what you want to remain private and what you don’t want to be private.
  • Personal Connection
    • Readers recommend books when they have a personal connection with the characters.
    • Readers recommend authors when they feel a personal connection with the author.
  • Know your circles well.
    • With Google plus, you can set up circles
      • your fans
      • your fans and acquaintances you’ve met in real life
      • your trusted friends
  • Q: Where should I spend my time? Facebook? Twitter? Google plus? Blog?
    • Use them all.
    • Cross link them. So when you do one post, it goes everywhere.
    • Know what they are useful for.
  • Twitter
    • It’s your watercooler conversations. You go over to the watercooler, you listen to a few sentences, and you say a few sentences, and then you leave.
    • Use it to converse with authors and fans. Sharing things you think are cool.
    • Use it to direct people to a larger article or larger discussion elsewhere.
  • Forums
    • Set up a fan forum, if you get that successful. Then set up a super fan as a moderator. Pop in once in a while, but let the fans have their space and moderate themselves.
  • Expanding your social media base
    • you must expand your base
    • some of it will happen automatically
    • if you are entertaining, it will attract people.
    • but make a decision: are you building your career, or going to relax? Because those are different kinds of posts.
    • Hobson: Spent the last six months reading what other people say and responding to it, amplifying it.
  • Building connections
    • See what other people need, and see if you can give it to them.
      • If you can, you build relationships and credibility.
    • Lester: Had a book with a female protagonist. There was a woman in the podcast community who was doing lots of voice recording, but not getting paid for them. He offered to pay her to record his stuff. Not only she do that, but she talked about him to everyone else. And she knew a lot of people in the podcasting community.
  • Author profile vs. personal profile on Facebook
    • Do make a separate author profile.

Posted on
by

Writing Formidable Women
Karen Zinger, M.K. Hobson, Steve Perry, Victoria Blake, Scott (Dark Horse Comics) – worked with Joss Whedon on Buffy stuff.
  • What do we call formidable? How do we apply that to fiction? How are women different than men in skirts?
  • Blake: My single criteria is if the woman wants something other than to please someone else.
  • Scott: Mike […] writes his female characters pretty much the same way he writes his male characters. They are just doing their jobs.
    • With one of the characters, recently did a story about their childhood, in that treated them somewhat differently.
    • In Buffy, it’s more that we wrote the men to be more like women.
  • Hobson: depends on genre. In military fiction, we are writing female characters to be masculine. There isn’t room in that genre to explore the other sides of the character.
    • So as a writer, we can make room for the character to do that. To explore their conflict over fitting into that world. To explore what they are giving up to do it. Not necessarily to show them baking a cake.
  • Azinger: I consider anything that a woman does to gain, keep, and wield power, they have a broad palette of ways to do it: by swords, by sexuality, by guile, etc.
  • Perry: There is a physicality that you have to take into account. If you have a 5’2’ woman wade into a room of bikers, she’d not going to fight them all and win. If she goes up against another martial artist, he will have a height, weight, and strength advantage over her. This stuff has to be taken into account.
  • Hobson: Does the woman have a discussion with another woman in the book that doesn’t revolve around a guy?
  • Blake says that if the only function of someone is to take care of the kids, taking care of a sick parent, or be pleasing (even in a way that isn’t sexual or sexualized), that’s not going to make a formidable character.
  • Scott: If you put a lot of T&A in there, it’s going to turn off women readers, regardless of.
    • when D.C. comics recently relaunched – 52 #1 issues in the month of september. They oversexualized Catwoman and Redhood, and there was a huge reaction from the overgrowing woman readership, and they freaked out when they saw these woman characters.
  • What do you considered a formidable woman character?
    • Blake: I am not looking for a woman to kick ass. I am looking for someone who is in pursuit of their goals.
    • Hobson: I think you can still be in service and be formidable. The whole core of Buddhism is that you are supposed to be in service to others. To me, it is somebody who has integrity and courage. They are true to themselves. They are not subsuming themselves to anyone else.
    • Scott: I write action adventure. So the nature of it is to have people who kick ass.
    • Blake: I am talking about an active character vs a passive character.
    • Azinger: Someone who has a goal and progresses to the goal or makes a difference in the world.
  • A protagonist overcomes obstacles to reach goals. This is the core of any story.
  • Comment from audience: the pleasing thing is an adaptive behavior of woman across cultures and history that they needed to do that in order to survive.
    • A strong woman today in Afghanistan will be murdered.
  • Writing formidable woman is more complex than writing formidable men because of these limitations.
  • A 5’2” woman will find a way to overcome the situation other than direct action. 
  • Azinger: It pisses me off when a woman starts out formidable, and then she turns into a wimp. This happens in Lord of the Rings. How can the writers create a great female character and then flip a switch and turn her into a wimp. It is so disappointing to me.
  • Hobson: Let’s talk about T&A and sexuality. 
    • I think there’s a difference between female characters that are sexual and ones that are over-sexualized.
    • There are men who want to see that and there are women who want to present themselves in that way.
    • Scott:
      • Someday i want to figure out how to do a Vampirella character that has integrity.
      • If you write men one way and women another way, then you have a problem. If the women are there only for the sexuality you have a problem.
    • Azinger: To me it’s all part of the palette that’s available, and you can use it all. You can use it badly or well. You can’t look at how woman gain, keep, and wield power without doing it.
      • But to me, what’s missing is the gray-haired characters.
      • Scott: It’s great when you can mess with expectations.
  • Blake: [To the panel] Do you feel a responsibility to write formidable female characters?
    • Hobson: I have a 13 year old daughter, of course.
    • Azinger: Absolutely. I write to overcome stereotypes and prejudices. 
    • Scott: I feel a responsibility to donate to charities. I feel like writing formidable female characters is a responsibility to tell the truth.
    • Perry: I am writing for my readership. I want to sell books. The first and only sin in writing books is if it isn’t entertaining. So anything in there has to be snuck in in such a way that it’s not a lesson, it’s part of the entertainment. 
      • It’s all part of who we are. Short, fat, young, old, – it has to represent everywhere.
  • Discussion of Sarah Conner in Terminator 2:
    • Perry: She’s cartoonish.
    • Scott: She was a defining moment in genre fiction. There was nothing like her before. I believe female fans and male fans ate that up.
  • Hobson: It’s a trope to put a woman in a man’s world, and make her pass for a man. It would be an interesting thought exercise to put a man in a woman’s world.
    • Scott: And not just to treat it as a comedy, which is the first thing that comes to mind:
    • Perry: I was a male nurse, and that is a case where you have a man in a women’s world.

Posted on
by

Structure of Writing
Victoria Blake, Jason Brock, S.A. Bolich, Devon Monk, Richard A. Lovett
  • Panel
    • Victoria: Love structure.
    • Jason: editor and filmmaker. like playing with structure. you can do a lot with it. mix it up, not just flashbacks, but other ways to tell the stories.
    • Devon Monk: several series. had to learn and internalize structure quickly as she had to write several novels very fast.
    • Richard Lovett: been accused of being too structure. just had his 100th story accepted by analog.
    • S.A. Bolich
  • What do you look for? 
    • Victoria: Your structure can serve as a proposal for the story that is separate from plot. Structure changes timeline, or scene, or point of view character that creates a whiplash effect. It’s like a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter. It’s not a release of new information (like the plot), it’s how and when the information is released.
    • Richard: His first story accepted by Analog has 14 point of view characters in 6,000 words using a strict rhyming scheme. A/B/A/B/A/B/A/B/C, then new scene.
    • Devon: 
      • We look for things in three.
      • Beginning, middle, end.
      • It’s getting bad, it’s getting worse, it’s as bad as it’s going to be. 
      • Christopher Vogel’s The Writer’s Journey. It’s based on the Hero’s Journey.
      • Hero’s Journey Overview (wikipedia)
        • Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD
        • they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE
        • They are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE CALL, but
        • are encouraged by a MENTOR to
        • CROSS THE THRESHOLD and enter the Special World, where
        • they encounter TEST, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES.
        • They APPROACH THE IN-MOST CAVE, cross a second threshold
        • where they endure the ORDEAL
        • They take possession of their REWARD and
        • are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary World.
        • They cross the third threshold, experience a RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the experience.
        • They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or treasure to benefit the ORDINARY WORLD.
  • Save The Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
  • Blake:
    • Write first.
    • Then ask your story for its structure.
    • How intellectual do I want this to be?
    • What is the timeframe of the story?
    • It’ll tell you what it wants to be.
    • Then do the hard work of mapping the story to that structure.
  • Ask yourself why events occur when they do.
    • If he becomes telekenetic on page 30 – why does it happen on page 30? Why not on page 35, or 28.
  • There’s microstructure and macrostructure.
  • Structure had better drive your story.
  • Bolich: I ask each scene: Did the character get what they want?
    • It should be “Yes, but…” or “No, and…”
    • They both create tension and keep the story going. Any other action is insufficient to propel the story forward. 
    • If the answer is simply yes, or simply no, that’s not enough.
  • A linear story is by nature episodic. Which gets repetitive. But you can fix this by modulating what you say.
    • The novel mixed exposition and narrative to achieve this.
    • The Road is a good example of this. 
  • Lovett: Readers have been told so much that you are supposed to start in the middle of the action — that it becomes hard to give them a strictly linear story. 
    • Monk: Depends on the genre. Different standards for different genre.
      • For me, the best opening is about people and conflicts.
  • Bolich: You can experiment, but not everything will work. 
  • Blake: Is there a fiction book that teaches you something about structure
  • Bolich spoke about writing in five act structure.
  • Lovett: It’s fun, especially in short form, to experiment with things that especially limit you. I did one story that was done entirely in the form of a discussion board discussion.
  • TV has really changed things. They have a four act structure with a prefix. It’s not the same as five act structure.
  • Blake: Another way to think about it is chronic tension vs. acute tension.
    • chronic tension is what your characters are built of. this is your character story.
    • acute tension is your plot. this is your action story. the acute tension dips down into the chronic tension. 
    • Monk: this is your internal change and external change.
    • Blake: I use an excel document and track the characters and tension in scene by scene, color coding things.
  • Brock: 
    • I write the first draft
    • I wait a few days
    • I print it out, and I read the whole thing on the printed page.
    • I go through the whole thing with a red pen. I’m spotting grammatically mistakes and also look for structural things.
    • Then I revised it and embellish it.
    • then I print it out, and go over it again.
    • I’ll rearrange paper pages to change structure.
  • Lovett: I do something similar. I’m looking for a sense of balance. I’m doing it intuitively. Also, I do it in print.
  • Q: Explain the excel thing again
    • Blake: 
    • If I have five main characters, I color code them.
    • On the left hand side I put the chapters
    • Then I’ll have a color coded block for each point of view character that shows up in that scene.
  • Blake: As an editor, when I review something, I do a 5-7 page review letter. Plus I also send along excel documents and supporting documentation.
    • I’m expecting that the author can defend their decisions.
  • Q: How do I know where chapters start and end?
    • Bolich: My rule is that it’s the action that goes together.
    • Lovett: One rule of thumb is not to intimidate the reader with large blocks of text. This effects paragraph structure and chapters. This usually comes up around 3,000 to 5,000 words. Now look for the natural breakpoints.
    • Blake: the chapters can tell a story. Let’s say your book is about a woman and a killer. 
      • You might expect something like W / W / W / K / W / W / W / K / W / W / K / W / W / K / K.
      • That tells you something right there about the story.

Posted on
by

Playing God: Apocalyptic Storytelling
EE Knight, Daniel H. Wilson, Victoria Blake
OryCon 33
  • Panel
    • Daniel – background in robotics. Wrote How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Then Robopocalyse.
    • Victoria – publisher of Underland Press. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror. We haven’t yet published a straight apocalypse novel.
    • EE Knight – vampire series, post apocalypse. dragons series. last book of dragon series is apocalyptic.
  • Apocalypse
    • definition: revelation
  • Favorite scenarios
    • Daniel: as a society, we’re totally enmeshed in technology. if you take the technology away, or if you turn the technology against us, that’s really fun. it tears the world around. it explores how we depend on it, and what we get out of it.
    • Victoria: apocalypse stories have to choose where they are situated: a year after the event, 50 years after the event. that choice interests me. 
    • One generations luxuries become another generations necessities. and then the next generation they become unneeded again. e.g. a post apocalyptic society wouldn’t say we need electricity for lights, they would just go to bed when it gets dark.
    • apocalypse is just a 5 minute event, and then it’s over.
  • anything done to death?
    • No… it just need to be done well.
    • zombie apocalypse done to death…and yet, still love to read them.
  • Daniel
    • when I read it, I want to know who the bad guys are.
    • apocalypse scenarios show us what people are made of. people stand up. heros are forged.
    • but when you get into things like people roasting babies on spits… that’s too contrived and too pointless. 
    • i want redemption. the apocalypse is about starting over clean. are we inherently good or bad? do we hunt and kill each other or work together
  • When you blow up whole worlds… movies like that thing. but you need to show the few people, which is what people care about.
    • You can focus too much on one person, or zoom out too far.
  • Zone One: 
    • literary apocalypse novel
    • no plot
    • three days
    • the end happens at the end.
  • The interesting part is seeing how people survive the scenarios.
  • The little details are what make stuff. 
  • Knight: I really like On The Beach. I do like the scenarios where everyone dies.
    • It’s a resonate book about a whole society where everyone knows when they are going to die.
  • Justin Kronan’s The Passage
    • the book is divided into thirds.
    • first third is the moment of the apocalypse
    • second third shoots forward in time dozens of years: rebuilding
    • third third
  • Q: Is it still an apocalypse novel if the apocalypse occurred 50 or 100 or 200 years ago?
    • Seems like yes.
    • Q: So what are the defining points of an apocalypse story?
    • Daniel: You need to establish the context. You have to have the world. You don’t know to do that if its Poland in WW2, because we know it. But if it’s a different world, you have to establish it. Then once you build it, you rip it apart. 
    • Knight: It’s the story of who lives and who dies. People have to make a choice of whether to live or die. 
  • It’s almost like running a simulation: let’s run five people through the simulation and see who lives and who dies.
  • There’s lots of real stories about apocalypses: every culture that died as a result of English colonization had an apocalypse. Maybe when you are living in the time, you don’t need to write about it.
  • Books discussed
  • If you want to research this stuff, you can live in places that give that feel. Go to South Africa.
  • Most Indian Reservations are post-apocalyptic societies.
  • Daniel: Used Native American background. Loved having cowboys and robots.
  • Q: Does a slow motion apocalypse qualifies? e.g. water wars, rising water levels. Is that an apocalypse, or just science fiction?
    • thermodynamics says everything is in growth or decline.
  • Seems like two types of stories:
    • the actual apocalypse: surviving
    • the post-apocalypse: rebuilding
  • In Orwell’s 1984, you have a protagonist trying to figure out what it was like before.
  • If you have an apocalypse scenario, what is the long story arc? To get across the street? To get to the hospital? Then what? There’s less to explore.
  • Apocalypse novels are exploration of current society’s fears: environment, radiation, government, cold war, robots.
  • Mockingbird – about robots that feed humans birth control drugs.
  • Kurt Vonnegut has a short story in which all people carry these little radios that tell them what to do all the time.
  • Ray Bradbury’s 
  • When you take away all the people, you take away all the meaning.
  • The Sparrow – unintended consequences of an anthropological mission.
  • Robopocalypse: 
    • We barely give each other any rights. We’re highly unlikely to give robots any rights. We’ve never had to deal with another sentient species, let alone a superior sentience.
  • Q: To Victoria Blake: What are you looking for in an apocalypse novel in as a publisher?
    • Blake: It just has to be done well.
  • Q: What’s going to be the next big apocalypse theme?
    • Technology
    • Robots
    • Home mortgages
    • Society collapsing under its own weight
      • The domino effect, the effect of only 3 days of food in new york city.
    • Drought

Posted on
by

Gender and Writing
Rhiannon Held, Cat Power, and Peter Smalley.
  • How does gender affect your writing?
    • Held: I have two main characters, one of them is male. My male readers tell me where I’ve gone wrong.
      • Women tend to talk more about people. Men tend to talk more about things.
      • But when you’re talking about defusing a bomb. It’s problems solving.
    • Smalley: My male and female characters tend to have different approaches to problem solving. More direct for the male, and more radiative for women.
    • Powers: I write more female characters than male, but don’t feel uncomfortable writing men – I grew up with brothers, had male friends, live with a man.
  • Powers: I get frustrated by writers who take 20th century gender relations and say it will be the same in the 25th century. Probably not.
    • Held: I don’t feel like it is central to the stories I write, so I don’t focus on it. With the exception of a werewolf.
    • Smalley: It’s an opportunity to bring out the similarities and differences in characters. I had two brothers in one story: I want to make one be a more manly man, and the other a thinking man. But it’s not enough to define them as a stereotype. You have to define it and move past it.
  • Held: Frustrated by the trend to make women kick-ass, sort of the Buffy effect. They can kick evil in the the butt. But how about something else – smarts, treachery, deception. 
  • Q: Do any of you feel like you should challenge the readers concepts of gender relationships or definition, and yet still give them a character they can relate to.
    • Smalley: 
      • I don’t feel like it is my job to challenge readers. It’s my job to tell a good story. I can challenge myself to do. I don’t want to preach. I want to learn about myself. I want to learn about my readers.
      • But saying all that, it’s not interesting to reader to pander to them. 
      • If I challenge the reader, it’s not to preach or simply to challenge, but to tell a more interesting story.
    • Held:
      • Therapeutic metaphor: I want to tell something so rich and complex that the reader can pull out of it what they need to take away what they need. I can’t control what they take.
      • Good vs. bad Jane Austin adaptations: Sometimes there can be a character defiance. They are defined in terms of defying things. But I want to read about characters doing things, living their life.
    • Powers: No one wants to read a book with an agenda. And challenging readers sounds like that. But I do want to challenge other writers. Much of what I write is in reaction to other stories.
      • To write a story about gender just to do it is bad craft. If it is part of the story, then good.
  • Held: It can be more feminine to have more allies. It’s not just how to solve the problem, but who will help you solve the problem.
  • Powers: Recently read an Asimov story about miners on the moon. All the action of the story is around who should go out in these little mining pods. At the end of the day, the miners go home to their wives who live in little picket fences. They never even think about what if the women went out.
    • What blinders do we have on that we aren’t aware of?
  • How does gender affect reception of a work?
    • For epic fantasy, the best sellers are still all men. One woman author was planning to use a pen name with initials so it would appear more masculine.
    • The exception is in urban fantasy, where the authors tend to be woman. 
    • So there still is some effect…
  • Nowhere do we have perfect equity between men and woman, but as we begin to approach that in society, we’ll see more of what nature vs. nurture brings to it.
  • Books
    • Writing the Other
    • How to Suppress Women’s Writer

Posted on
by

My notes from a panel discussion on internal character change and external change in novels at OryCon 33.

Internal and External Change
Mary Roseblum/Mary Freeman, Dianna Rodgers, Ken Scholes, Mark J. Ferrari, Andrew S. Fuller
OryCon 33
  • Introduction
    • Ken Scholes, writer of short stories and novels. Has a five book series with Tor, three books are out. Writing since high school, with a long break. 10th OryCon.
      • I want my character to change or be changed. Sometimes the change happens in the reader: a revelation about the character can create a change in perspective in the reader. Result of Kate Whilhelm workshop. She has a book on writing.
    • Dianna Rodgers
      • All people, characters or not, are struggling with the question of to change or not to change. Most of the time there is a contract with the reader, expecting some kind of change. But sometimes you can also bring people right up to the brink of change, and then have them decide not to.
    • Mark Ferrari, illustrator. Recently discovered that while a picture may be worth a thousand words, a thousand words pays more and is easier to produce. Recently published first book. Many time OryCon attendee.  
      • If you read a whole story, and nobody learned anything or had anything happen to them, it’s not even a story.
    • Andrew Fuller, writes primarily short fiction.  
      • There has to be conflict, of course. The times I enjoy writing is when it feels like I am just reading it and discovering as I go. That happens in the time of change.
    • Mary Rosenblum, primarily a character writer.
      • In character driven work, you are looking for depth of character, and that only comes from both internal and external change.
      • But in some genre of stories: military SF, action SF, detective story you can be carried along just on the external action. They still lack depth, but the action carries them along.
  • In Star Trek episodes, the world remains the same, the characters remain the same from episode to episode, but within an episode characters learn something, and action happens.
    • But characters still develop over time. Spock becomes more human, develops a friendship with Kirk. In Voyager, Paris changes from very angry to more comfortable in his skin.
  • Why is internal change so important?
    • It’s an important of the human experience.
    • Many people have difficulty changing themselves. So it can be a sense of success and satisfaction to feel the character change. 
    • All people want to change something about themselves or the people around them or the world.
  • If your character doesn’t seem to learn things, to change, they aren’t going to seem human.
  • It matters HOW they change.
    • You want to keep people guessing about who will prevail. But there is a presumption that the protagonist will prevail. The ultimate outcome is kind of presumed. 
    • So the real tension and excitement comes from HOW they will succeed, how they will prevail, how they will acquire what they need. 
  • All of this assumes that if characters are going to improve, then they can’t be perfect to begin. They must be flawed.
    • George R.R. Martin’s game of thrones series is filled with wonderfully flawed characters.
  • So much of fiction is based on change
    • the external circumstances force internal change
  • You can’t just say “It’s been done” because something has the same plot. The story depends on the characters followed and the changes they go through. 
    • H.G.Wells war of the worlds was totally different than the later treatment in which the focus is on a dad and his relationship with his children, and how he rises of being a shitty dad. Totally different story, same plot of aliens invade, kick our ass, and die of the common cold.
  • There is a danger in people who are beginning to write in that they try to artificially add the change. It becomes just tacked on. It’s a trap. There author feels it needs to be there, and so they add it, but it is not intrinsic.
    • Things are going well when your characters have enough integrity and depth that they ignore your outline, and make their own decisions.
  • Process – How much of the internal change is in your head when you start?
    • Andrew Fuller – For short fiction, I don’t have an outline. So I just write, and I like to be surprised.
    • Mark Ferrari – I want to know 3 things before I start writing. How the story begins. How the story ends. What’s the story about? Not what happens, but what it’s about: anger? loss? etc.
      • So I pretty much discover everything about my characters on the way.
      • I make some outlines as I go just I don’t forget things.
      • But from one sentence to the next, I don’t know what my characters are going to say.
      • But if whatever is happening – if it doesn’t have to do with what the story is about, then then it has to get scraped out.
      • Great story about his work as an artist: He loved drawing the details. And he’d finished these highly detailed drawing, but you couldn’t get a sense of the theme of the piece. So he’d have to erase the details or color over them so that they would fall into the background, and the primary stuff would come to the surface.
        • [Will: this reminds me of photographs: you want a shallow field of focus to make some stuff fuzzy and some stuff sharp, and that makes an interesting photo.]
  • Q: How do you write the revelatory moments?
    • Ken: it’s a revelation i felt personally, so I can describe because I can feel it.
    • Dianna: it has to be consistent with the internal motivation. It somethings is internal dialogue. Sometimes it’s external. it depends.
    • Mary: It’s the plot, forcing the character to the point where they can’t ignore, they have to deal with it.
    • Mark: the stories I write are all about that moment. i punish my characters until they break. if they can recover from that, the story goes on. if they can’t, then that’s the revelatory moment. there’s no where else to go.

Posted on
by

My notes from a panel on the use of description in writing. At OryCon 33.

Description
Victoria Blake: Publisher Underland Press
Alma Alexander: Writer, described as a lush writer.
David W. Goldman: short fiction, science fiction for ~6 years.
Devon Monk: urban fantasy, and several others
Bill Johnson: Playright, screenplays
  • People don’t self describe. Beginning writers tend to have characters look into mirrors  and describe themselves. But people don’t do that.
    • Unless your character has some flaw they are very self-conscious about
  • Blake: some writers describe themselves at lyrical writers. But it can be pretty but meaningless. Lyrical can be lazy writing: lots of words that aren’t edited.
  • Monk: description has to be tied to the emotional reaction of the character. A character who has lost a child and describes a pair of baby shoes, that means something.
  • Typically these days, most people are writing with a close point of view. Anything you describe is from that characters point of view. What they see and don’t see. It does more than just describe, it tells us what the character observes.
  • Adverbs: good or bad?
    • Johnson:
      • Nouns: good
      • Verbs: good, be more specific.
      • Adjectives: a few
      • Adverbs: none
      • “Suddenly he bolted from the room.” You don’t need suddenly if you have bolted. We know that means suddenly.
    • Monk: Suddenly you can describe what you need in the structure of your writing. Short sentences go faster. Long sentences slow things down, but the reader only remembers the end of it, so the important part needs to go there.
      • Short snappy descriptions will get you a lot further than long ones.
    • Blake
      • em dash – one of my favorite tools. because it’s not a comma, so you can do interesting things with it. “John — young, drunk and stupid — jumped out the window.”
  • Blake: the view paragraph.
    • The character goes up to the top of a building, plane, or something: and they take in the view. In one to three paragraphs, we get the whole world.
    • This is good — a useful tool to give the world succinctly.
  • Alexander: China Melville is a masterful description – not by long lengths of details – but with using the right words. 
  • Monk: a great practice is to look at the world around you, the common things around you, and describe them in a unique way to you. Then think about how your characters would describe them. You want practice doing this sort of stuff.
  • description tends to fall into one of two cases:
    • expositional vs in-scene
    • exposition is not in the flow of the story, and it requires a different structure.
    • You kill your action scene if get into exposition in the middle. Just work the description into the action scene.
  • Q: What about when we have an action scene, and then in the middle of it we have a “16 hours earlier…”
    • You can do it to have fun with your reader [good]
    • Or you can do it because you are a beginning writer who wrote a really boring beginning to your story, and instead of fixing it, you try to throw something in at the beginning. [bad]
  • Q: I was in a workshop and someone said “You don’t have enough description” and someone else said “You have too much”
    • Blake: That’s workshop speak for “Somethings wrong but I don’t know what”
    • Goldman: You need to get to symptoms first, not diagnosis: I’m bored is a symptom. Too much description is a diagnosis.
    • Monk: Everyone wants different things.
  • Blake: The only way writers can learn is to study language. Learn about adverbs. Learn about long sentences vs short ones. Exposition vs not. Write a one page report on it to make it really concrete.
  • Q: Talk about using dialogue as a way to convey description
    • “Come back to bed, I’m cold.”
    • The only way to get your dialogue going is to read it out loud.
    • In first person, it’s especially helpful to use the opposing characters to bring out description that wouldn’t come out otherwise.
  • Adverbs:
    • A verb + an adverb ==> usually there’s a better verb to use. 
  • Said / Asked
    • At one time, don’t use it at all. Books were full of growls and chortled.
    • Nowadays, they say only use said and asked. Just do it and move on. They are invisible to the reader.
  • But the important thing is to write. Don’t let this hold you back from writing. Just get the first draft done, put it away, and then go back and revise.
  • Q: The use of description as it is different for each genre
    • Goldman: I’m writing with a tight point of view. So it’s about what the character is experiencing at this point in time.