Sample Post: the opening scene from Bubbler

Prelude

1

Kas flinched, blinking and rolling his eyes against the sudden brightness of the lights through the clear liquid perflourocarbon filling the room. Not again.

Maith’s voice filled the room, drifting from the speakers as she glided from her niche.

“Mer Joans thrashes again, young master Salipoor. He is having another nightmare. Shall I touch him?”

Kas set his reader down and glared across at his bunkmate, a standard-type human still twitching and straining against his netting, veins swollen and blue in his reddening face, his abdomen heaving. Do, he signed with an affirming nod, slowly squeezing a breath of the heavy fluid from his lungs.

She turned and kicked once, sliding smoothly the short distance across the room to rescue the frightened young sleeper. Kas grumped at the body sheath she’d taken to wearing while Cayleb Joans was aboard and might see her – not for her modesty, to which she’d never been conditioned, but for the young human’s comfort. Maith was modified, but was modeled after them, the standard type most common across the Dominion, if small and pale and lithe and perfect…so much more like Cayleb than himself, though Cay was darker than either of them by many shades.

He brooded and watched her trying to wake the dry-breather. A bubbler like himself, unable to breathe real water, but from a whole race where such a thing was considered normal.

Mom?

Cay was little again, maybe seven, trying to walk to the duty station where his mother usually sat her shift watching monitors. The hall was familiar, but reverted in memory to gargantuan scale; he moved his feet, always sure and steady in the familiar rotation, but now they only drifted in the strange, not-quite-weightlessness of an absurdly heavy medium.

He was afloat, and baffled. Mom?

He couldn’t speak. His throat was full of water. His lungs were full of it, his sinuses, his ears.

He panicked, but he couldn’t scream.

“Mer Joans. Cayleb Joans. You must wake, Mer Joans. You are safe. You are not drowning, Mer Joans. You must allow yourself to breathe, but slowly, so that you do not damage your throat or lungs.”

Maith managed to get the netting off him and free him into the room. He bobbed toward the ceiling just a little too near the door, where he might have bobbed up into the real water, though there was still no immediate danger; he’d have to take the netting off the hole, go through it, and then turn himself upside-down for his lungs to begin to empty of the hyperoxygenated PFC fluid fast enough to matter. Even so, she followed him up to help him calm down, but the rap on his skull when he impacted the ceiling did more than the soft drone of her voice.

Kas began to sign irritably. Maith’s voice translated over the speakers, freakishly morphing into Kas’ own.

“My master asks: What’s wrong with you, Cay? By the damned, there’s only one chamber fitted for us on this bottle, so unless you want to sleep up on the command decks, you need to stop it!” Kas rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his webbed hands before he continued. “And before you think you’re going to try that, those are full of crew running around doing ship stuff, and they’re too busy to have you sprawled underfoot. Damned! Take care of him.” She translated the last as well as all the rest, though it was directed to her.

He let go of his own net and drifted up as well, though not as fast as Cayleb. Standard humans were lighter than Hydrans, and could hardly stand more than superficial pressure changes. Yet I’m the handicapped one, he though bitterly. He sucked his lungs full before he opened the door netting and bobbed up into the next room, leaving Maith to take care of the drowned, trembling, disoriented Cay. He heard her switch back to her own voice over the intercom to sooth the distressed young man, dutifully treating him to the dressing Kas usually received himself. The light shining up from the bedroom below lit this room in streaks and shadows. Kas could feel the lesser weight of true water around him, the difference in the way it stuck to his skin. He breathed out just a little of the PFC fluid to make some room and felt it running slowly down his chin and chest and crotch, headed surely for the slightly sloped floor which would drain it back into the bedroom for reprocessing.

Real water, he thought, waving his hand through it to feel the currents. He knew it wasn’t really from Hydra’s seas, but was carefully constituted to be a clean and healthy approximation, plus a few harmless agents to help the life support system. In here it was cool to his skin, comfortable. He tasted the salt on his tongue as he breathed it in carefully, just a shallow breath to savor, though he didn’t pull it in far enough to reach his lungs. Real water. This is what my father is breathing in his room. He set his jaw and closed his inner lids, then slowly slid his true eyelids down over the nictitating membranes and swallowed reflexively. My father, Ra Salipoor Den, statesman and exemplar of our planet’s people…appointed Delegate for the planet of Hydra to the Federal Dominion Collegium, and last of the great gen Salipoor but for me, Den Salipoor Kas, his handicapped, melodramatic bubbler son. Alas, how the mighty have fallen.

941 GUARANTEED WAYS to Write PERFECT CHARACTERS!!!!!

Yeah, right. Sell me a bridge.

We all know there are no guarantees, or any perfection. The trick is to find dependable ways to be good. For that, you gotta "pay your dues" and "put in your time", and we all get tired of hearing that.

Tough.

There are things that can help, though. People say "write what you know," but writers must sometimes write things of which they know little. My hero takes a heavy dose of hallucinogens, but I've never tried them. He kills several people and has to decide how to deal with it. I've never killed anyone.

Some things are simple. I've never been stung by a lionfish. Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia.

But characters? Every character sees the world differently. I can only write characters I know if each is me or some horrible Mary Sue. That's not what I want, and not what a reader wants.

You'll hear that every character is the heroine of her own story. No one is "just" a sidekick or a plot device. Everyone is in their own egocentric predicament, but how do we show it?

A wife gets up to feed dogs and let them all out. The husband grabs coffee and stumbles to his office. If we say no more, the reader reads what they choose. It's normal and no one thinks twice, or he sympathizes with one and rails at the other. We want him to sympathize with both.

She doesn't ask for help, because she doesn't feel she contributes enough. The eldest can get cereal while caged critters get their care, but she sighs that the husband doesn't help with the toddler before rushing to tweet and check Facebook. She manages not to complain, and life goes on. 

He wants to post that "she feeds the dogs and leaves me hungry." He grinds his teeth over expensive specialty food, vet bills, dog hair in his coffee and the couch they replaced because of the puke, but so few things make her happy. He manages not to complain, and life goes on.

Both are dissatisfied with the other's behavior. Both keep quiet out of love. Both fail to see the other's perspective in any depth, because they are individuals.

Voila! Conflict. Depth. Opportunity for foreshadowing about something later in the book more important than petty differences in preferred morning rituals. A chance for each to be an ass, to learn, to feel chagrined, to grow.

A chance for the reader to vicariously see the world through someone else's eyes. A chance to feel, which is what writing fiction is about.

Make it count.

Writing Distractions

The biggest complaints I hear from other writers concerning their craft boil down to writing distractions. They come in the form of family, illness, writer's block...

Sitting here about to go spend some quality time with the kids. We’ll watch an ep or two of Avatar and then maybe play some World of Warcraft, one of the biggest writing distractions I know of, next to kids, that is. It should make for a fun night.

And I just had the nerve to complain that I didn’t make word count today. Yikes!

Understand that I’ve found setting goals enormously useful in getting things done. My current goal is 3000 words a day, a giant step up from my previous feeble goal of 500 a day. That was back when I struggled for each and every word I put down. Now I struggle for every third word or so. Big step up.  I do it by telling myself writing distractions can't be eliminated, so I'd better learn to deal.

Some writers believe it’s important to not only set a word count goal, but to beat yourself up over it when you don’t make it. My thought process runs a little closer to Nathan Bransford, whose blog post On Distractions details the  benefits of allowing yourself time away from your writing.

Those of us whose principle writing distraction is family need to remember that they still need us. If you’re single, consider the friendships you’d like to maintain. No one writes in a vacuum, so why not allow your friends the opportunity to help you along with a night out or even just a few minutes on Skype to prove you remember each other? Just like any other job, there are times when you need to let the cogs cool off and give the subconscious time to work. Writing distractions let you spend quality time with your subconscious.

I forget those needs on occasion. I count myself lucky I have family to remind me.

Thinking Out of the Bottle

Writers are supposed to be eccentric. Off-center; having a different way of looking at things. We are the people to whom others look for thinking that is "outside the box" and innovative. In general, we say things oddly, such as here referring to an idea as Out of the Bottle rather than the sterotypical "outside the box".

Yes, it confuses people, but often it's because we are saying more than just one simple thing. If an idea is Out of the Bottle, we might mean that it's outside the box, but have managed to say it without using the tired, cubicle-bound cliché. We also might mean that it's inspired, like a genie appearing deus ex machina from a lovely blue glass antique decanter to grant our wishes.


How could you mean two things at once? Speak plainly, say the plebeian masses! To which we roll our eyes, pained at the rejection of our double entendre, but with no intention of giving it up. We have loosed our wit upon the world, and are also obliquely referring to the tritely ubiquitous cat that has managed to escape the proverbial bag, not to be returned. No one heeds the warning.

Of course, writers are often drunks. Tell someone they seem as sober as Hemingway and if they read they'll probably realize you're being sarcastic.  Read through Frankenstein and play spot-the-laudanum, the scenes where Shelley had indulged in just a tad too much opium-laced wine; if you're paying attention, you'll see the passages where she wanders off for pages on the descriptions of snow on the mountainside, before coming back to Earth and to the story.

Thinking out of the bottle might mean getting your inspiration from your buddies Jim Beam and Jack Daniels, but it also might mean climbing out of their aromatic embrace long enough to think clearly. Sometimes the liquid muse needs to step aside for some editing.

For many writers, though, the high isn't even the alcohol. It's the power trip. We are the genie, cooped inside our own heads until someone rubs the book and out we spring to spin forth worlds. We have to be both villain and victim as well as hero, and must try to make the reader do the same. We are trapped in these stories until we can think our way out of the bottle ourselves.

Come with me. Pick up a good book, batten down the hatches and let's head for deep water and high adventure. This ship is as big as your imagination, and doesn't belong stuck on the shelf in a bottle.

Critical Mass

I asked the internet what I should blog about. My dear friend @DeniseJTompkins (for whom I will be buying dinner soon) tweeted:

Talk to me about the critique process. What you look for, what you think an opening needs, where you see writers lacking. :)

As if I would know.

I can do 2k words a day, at least for dedicated sprints like NaNoWriMo.

I can hold to a plot line, and get through with conflict, and dramatic moments, and an ending that means something.

I can generate setting and incorporate worldbuilding into the writing without too much data dump.

I'm pretty good at these tools of the trade, but no one's perfect. I'm not even close. Thank goodness for edits and rewrites.

But even then, there's always the Egocentric Predicament. There are always distractions. There are always games to me played, tweets to be posted, and some family time before ANY of that. I miss things.

As I go through my WIP now, practically done at 85k words, the story is vastly improved from the first rough 50k draft from nanowrimo. The characters are more believable, the setting more gritty, the plot moves more sharply, and the themes are more acute. It's starting to feel like a book. So...

Time for feedback. I get my wife to read it when she can. She's an almost perfect critique partner, but she has other work to do. She's polishing her own book, and has agreed to critique a couple of other authors. We both try to do critiques on Litopia.com and Critters.org, so I can't expect tons of feedback on a daily basis. We've also already experienced re-reader fatigue - when you've read and re-read the edits until they all blur together and you can no longer tell what's in the story and what isn't.

We could turn to friends and family, but we know better than to tap that source too early. Wait till the last possible minute, get it as clean as you can before emptying that piggybank, because if you can find anyone who will read for you, they'll probably only do it once. Don't expect hard, honest, brutal feedback, either. What you really need is the last thing most people want to tell you.

Of course, we also try to post our own work to Critters and Litopia. Critters is good, but getting crits is based on giving them, and people often grind through their minimum to pay their dues. Some people give beautiful input, and they are complete strangers, so they will be brutal, but they also sometimes have no idea what they're talking about. Litopia takes a lot of time to put in your dues to get to the houses, so there really aren't that many people on them doing the critiques. Again, fatigue can set in, and you don't get repeated feedback on a developing work unless you get somebody hooked.

Many aspiring writers turn to critique groups, but so few of these are worthwhile. I had the pleasure to meet Denise in one, but others end up as venues for people pimping their business, or just looking for mutual intellectual masturbation, or sometimes with earnest good intentions but no useful input.

I recommend you try all the above, but don't expect to hit paydirt soon. Like so much else in this field, you have to pay your dues and put in the time before you are likely to get lucky enough to find a valuable partner. If/when you do, hold on to them. Make sure you keep them happy. Give more than you expect to get.

Denise asks "What you look for, what you think an opening needs, where you see writers lacking".

I look for anything that makes me remember I'm reading a book. Spelling and punctuation and grammar must be nearly perfect to remain invisible. Deviations should be obviously intentional and nonintrusive. What I look for is what I hope my own crit partners will ferret out.

Please, point out my fumble-fingers and duh- moments. Highlight the words I use too often. Tell me if the dialogue seems stilted. After those, watch for logical gaffes, like the character driving a car he buys three chapters later.

Then help me eradicate loose ends and dud threads. A book shouldn't be a one trick pony, but subplots that don't deliver are just tumors that should be excised. Foreshadowning and hints left unresolved are either hooks for the next book, or open sores that should never have been cut.

Stories have themes. Help me find it, build it, sharpen it, and seed it throughout.

I like an opening that isn't too busy. Don't drop me in the middle of a firefight and expect me to care who wins. Give me some characterization, a reason to choose a side beside the POV of the protagonist. Honestly, as much as it seems taboo, I don't mind the character waking up at the start, or even having a dream, though I know agents tend to hate it because they see so much of it. Just make it relevant and interesting. Give me a reason to care. I do want conflict, but I'd so much rather see an internal conflict that exposes the person to me.

What I really see writers lacking more than anything else these days is confidence. Be fluent in your language. Be secure in your world. Be bold in your language! As Stephen King said in On Writing, tell the truth. If a character would say fuck, then as much as I may detest the casual use of the word in writing, use it! If he would not, then be true to the character. Some people really do say darn.

So if you're reading this, I assume you have at least a passing interest in writing or publishing or someone who does. If so, consider donating some time for a free read, and the bragging rights to be able to say "I knew that story when it was just a ragged draft, knee high to a novella." Offer a friend a critique on their work in progress, and if you write as well, let them know, maybe they'll return the favor.

Twitter is Better Than Chores

Watching the feed go by this morning, and I see

maureenjohnson @maureenjohnson

@Toccata_in_D I'm sure everything is fi- *gets sucked into alternate universe*" It's that kind of Sunday. I knew it.

With no other point of reference, I laugh. I love this. Then I look to see who @Toccata_in_D might be, because I happen to love Bach's Toccata in D Minor (that's the piece the Phantom of the Opera plays.)
             
@Toccata_in_D is Tacarra Williams, whose lovely photo includes awesome architecture in the background, and whose website is http://vworpvworpvworpthud.tumblr.com .

Before I even looked at the rather cool bit of humor on the site, I almost fell out of my chair over the name.

These are the people with whom I hope to associate, to cheer my mornings and inspire my evening writing.

Thank you all for sharing your wit. I hope to someday be worthy of it.  :)

Taking requests

I haven't posted here for some time, and I was musing that my musings are really not very enlightening to other people unless they happen to be curious about the thing that's on my mind on a given day. Accordingly, I posted a request for requests on my facebook page, and got back a couple of responses.

The most honorable runner-up for today's exposition was Mr. Steve House, the only man I ever hugged who slapped a peppermint out of his own mouth. Steve asks:

Steve House If a woman weighs more than a duck, is she really a witch?

Steve, I'm glad you asked. This is a common misconception - weight actually has nothing to do with it. Women are witches because they are the pure form of the genome, lacking the chromosomal anomaly which causes the growth of a penis, which steals vital blood flow from the brain. Having all their blood flow available for their brains, and none of that pesky left-brain activity which is also typically associated with men, they are capable of using the full power of their emotive and intuitive endowment.

But the overachiever award for most divergent questions in a single post goes to Mr. Tom Clark, another old friend from college. Tom asks:

Tom Clark Hmm... a couple of obvious ones: Why do navels collect lint, i.e. why do they even have a hobby they didn't tell you about, and also: Why are kitten farts cute, but dog farts awful? Evidently, inquiring minds wish to know. Expound, profusely....

Well, Tom, I think I can help. Let me take these in order.

First: "Why do navels collect lint?"
Tom, have you ever had Mushroom Syndrome? Imagine being your navel - kept covered up most of the time with nothing to look at but the insides of comfy T's and Polo's or the undersides of bedsheets (except for the occasional fortuitous extreme closeups with his counterpart), let out for a daily watering and the rare glimpse of sunshine? Then there's the mirror, where he hears what a sexy bitch he is. While it might be true, if it were you, so constantly covered and kept in the dark, would you believe it?

You would not. You would feel shunned and lied to, and would find whatever meager hobby you could that didn't involve asking for any help or an allowance. I'd wager, if you were to check at the right time, you'd find he also collects sweat, though it's trickier to keep. And after all, quality sweat is hard to come by.

As for your second question: "Why are kitten farts cute, but dog farts awful?"
You may be surprised to hear this, but it's actually a well established survival trait.

This is elementary logic. We love our family, but we are rarely thrilled to hear the foghorn that warns of impending methane. Cute little love-me farts are not necessary for them, because we already intend to keep them.

Cat's, on the other hand, are the world's single most successful and prolific household vermin. They need that little oh-isn't-fluffy-adorable factor to keep themselves out of our stewpots. Consider this: would a mouse fart not also be cute? Yet we exterminate them, because they hide, and do not share their farts with us. Do you not think a rat fart might be endearing as well?

Cats, however, have over the millenia indoctrinated us to be the gleeful recipients of their anal disdain. How many times have you seen a cat, purring under the loving administrations of their hypothetical "owner", back their upturned asses into that doting dupe's face? "Oh, it's love," the humans exclaim, and the cat merely waves its smug little clay-clumped rump at us and struts away, secure in the knowledge that we are waiting for it to fart on us.