Tuesday climate control haiku

UK branch of a
dot-com. Five years here, with no
heating each winter.

One of the amusing things about working for my company — the EMEA offices of a Silicon Valley .com — is that despite being based in a modern business park with nearly all of the mod-cons, our building’s air conditioning system only works when the weather is warm enough to go without a jacket or jumper. In May we will have been here 5 years and in that time, whenever it’s cold outside the heat exchangers freeze over and it only provides us with cold air.

Nothing the maintenance company does seems to fix it, despite waving a blank cheque under their noses. Something on the system blew up in October, leaving the occupied half of the building with no climate control at all, so this winter has been spent in jumpers and coats, and with fan heaters at our feet.

Technology and service industries, eh? You have to laugh.

Saturday astronomical haiku

Cold room, poor heating.
The local astronomy
meeting was great fun.

Astronomy is one of my many interests, and tonight was the Astrobasics meeting for my local society, Reading Astronomical Society. The Astrobasics meetings take place at a wetland nature reserve close to Reading in a building that is freely available to local groups and societies. It’s a lovely wildlife location in the day time, and at night it is a remarkably dark area and ideal for night sky viewing.

As with all such venues, the lighting, heating and insulation are a challenge, so there were 20 or so of us all rugged up in our layers of warm clothing, watching a presentation on Mars and oblivious to the cold. After the talk was tea and biscuits, followed by Q&A and general chit-chat.

Not a bad way to spend a Saturday evening once a month.

 

Friday writing and podcast haiku

On the way to work
my podcasts remind me that
I should be writing!

It has been a number of years since I’ve listened to the radio in my car, and it’s rare that I listen to music anymore while driving. Since fitting an iPod car kit* I’ve listened almost exclusively to audiobook and podcast content, starting with Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time audiobooks and lasting until I discovered all the podcasts that exist for my many interests, including writing.

This morning’s commute podcast was Episode 139 of Mur Lafferty’s always excellent I Should Be Writing (see what I did with the haiku?) with Matt Wallace as the guest, covering their Christmas season topics.

If you have not yet discovered the joys of podcasts, particularly if you commute to work or school, or have a block of free time on a regular basis where you can focus on audio — just like sitting down and listening to the radio as your parents or grandparents did (not as easy as it sounds, with all the other distractions these days — have a look at my previous 10 Podcasts for Writers post. However, I don’t listen to Lifehack Live, PerfCast or Hot For Words, but I do also listen to:

• The Creative Penn. Interviews, inspiration and information on writing, publishing options, internet sales and promotion.
• The Secrets – Podcasts for Writers. No longer in production, this tutorial series has an excellent archive.
• The Writing Show. Another inspirational, interview-centred podcast with excellent archives.

I use iTunes as my podcatcher (podcast client) and simply sync my iPod with it sometime each weekend, all ready for the coming week. It doesn’t get any easier. If you have not used it before for podcasts, some podcast websites have a “Subscribe via iTunes” link that points to an apple.com address, which will automatically open iTunes and set up the subscription. Other will simply have an RSS, Atom or XML feed that you copy and paste into the Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast menu in iTunes.

* My CD/tuner is made by Kenwood, so I installed their iPod Interface Kit that plugs into the back of the radio and provides a single iPod plug that can be placed in the glovebox, keeping everything out of sight, and completely controlled from the radio’s front panel controls. Seamless, simple and works brilliantly.

Thursday haiku

Last night I went through
the writing markets. Cast the
net. Waiting game starts.

I spent last night polishing up a couple of short stories and going through the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2010 looking for suitable markets for them. There were a number of matches, so now I’ll have to wait and see if they bite.

The time has come to stop messing about and begin pitching my stories and see if I can see them in print in a recognised magazine (no offence intended to e-zine and online-only publishers). It will give my confidence and ego a boost, and will hopefully provide openings — or at least a foot on the ladder — for future efforts.

Some of you know I also write elsewhere on non-fiction issues, and I’m also aiming to get that work into print. So if things go well with one or the other, I hope to be able to brag share the details here when the time comes.

Until then, my life will consist of writing fiction and non-fiction material, finding and pitching markets, continuing to learn how to go about successfully writing novels, and of course the long waiting game between making a submission and hearing back on whether or not it has been accepted. It’s a strange choice of career…

Wednesday haiku

It amazes me
how some people can’t abide
a moment’s silence.

One of my colleagues, and a good friend outside the workplace, is a naturally nervous person who has at least one leg jittering and bobbing all day, every day. On some days he’ll tend to fill quieter office moments with any kind of noise that he can, ranging from making the chair squeak (with his leg bobbing), drumming feet, humming, whistling, eating all food loudly, slurping hot or cold drinks, tapping the table, coughing and throat-clearing, and so on. You get the idea.

Although I’m equally driven, this is the exact opposite of me. I could win the International Praying Mantis Award for Silence & Stillness, if it existed. Fascinating world, isn’t it.

It’s a haiku!

Flickr CC-BY devosdelphin

While I’ve never been an avid reader of poetry or haiku, earlier this month I set myself the challenge of writing a haiku every day. I suppose my lack of interest in these writing forms comes down to two reasons: the schoolboy opinion that it was uncool or unmanly (yet I did not apply this measure to prose) and not having had a great deal of exposure to it.

It was only when I reached my twenties that I began reading poetry for pleasure, and that was because it moved me deeply. Foremost were the works of the poet soldier Rupert Brooke (The Soldier affects me with each reading) and then Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, probably best known for The Song of Hiawatha. I still don’t read much poetry, but at least I no longer automatically disregard it.

If you are interested — and like reading on your computer or have an ebook reading device — their respective complete poetical works are now in the public domain and can be found at the simply brilliant Project Gutenberg in various formats:

• EText 262: The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke
• EText 1365: The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Over the years I have discovered that I do quite enjoy writing poetry, particularly the short and simple linguistic challenge of writing haiku. So as a way to exercise another aspect of my writing, I’ve decided to practice writing haiku (and maybe even poetry as time progresses). But rather than only posting them to Twitter, as I have been doing, I’ll post them here instead. Not only will it keep this site ticking over while I’m finding my feet as a ‘blogging writer,’ but it will keep it all in one place that belongs to me.

My understanding of Haiku is that it is a 17 syllable grouping of 5/7/5, with punctuation or pause wherever you decide (if at all). I have seen even this basic ‘rule’ broken beyond comprehension on the Twitter #haiku hashtag, but that’s what art is all about, I suppose!

So without further waffle, here’s today’s haiku:

Now the snow has gone,
a beautiful sunny week.
Snow is forecast soon.

It should be recognisable to anyone familiar with recent UK weather. After the worst snow since the winter of 1962-63 the snow has almost thawed off the ground, though there are piles of it all still about (and my hamstrings and lower back have only just recovered from shovelling a great deal of it). The Met Office say it’s coming back later this week. Oh well, what can you do?

Please let me know if you like them, or indeed if you have any opinions or constructive criticism.

On first lines

Flickr CC-BY-ND welcometoalville

On the subject of pantsing and first lines, I thought I’d share an interesting literary magazine with you called The First Line.

At the start of each year, they put up on their website the first sentence of a story (a writing prompt) for each quarter and tell you to have at it, ensuring you submit your story or stories to them by each edition’s deadline on the 1st days of February, May, August and November. According to their submission guidelines, The First Line will pay for fiction and non-fiction submissions that are accepted for print.

Their Mission statement:

The purpose of The First Line is to jump start the imagination-to help writers break through the block that is the blank page. Each issue contains short stories that stem from a common first line… The First Line is an exercise in creativity for writers and a chance for readers to see how many different directions we can take when we start from the same place.

Just to make it clear in case you missed it the first time: you can become a paid and published author for simply doing well what many of us were asked to do during creative writing lessons at school. You can see why it excited me, I’m sure.

If you’re like me and want a copy of an earlier edition before submitting, you can buy individual back issues via their online shop. I have their Spring 2008 (v10n1) edition of ten stories, which cost US$3.50 plus $5 international shipping to the UK. The book is about 21x13cm and 5mm thick, which is about the dimensions of a Commando magazine, but half again as tall (or was when I read them as a boy).

There are many of these kinds of literary magazines out there, to cover every genre and style, and come in various formats from glossy magazines to online PDF delivery. If you can’t find a listing in your Writer’s Market or equivalent, I suggest trying your preferred Internet search engine.

To give you a basic idea, I spent a couple of hours a few months ago and discovered the following:

• Albedo One
• Interzone
• Literary Review
• Notes from the Underground
• Rogue Worlds and Simulacrum

Then there are magazines your parents could probably tell you about:

• Analog
• Asimov’s Science Fiction

And lastly special-purpose publications such as the Hope #1 and Hope #2 anthologies, which were created to raise funds for the Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009. (I find this amazing and inspiring).

The world is your shellfish.

Trying a New Writing Method (Anti-Pants!)

Among the many the things I’m striving to achieve in my writing career, I am currently trying to get my head around the concept of pre-planned writing. As a lifelong pantser, an instinctive technique that has served me well in all my short story writing, this is coming as something of a shock!

To aid with this, I’m making use of Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, which essentially sees you start at the logline of a book (the one-sentence summary of what it’s about that also doubles as your “elevator pitch” when you try to sell it) and then gradually expand into paragraphs, pages, character sheets, etc, until you’ve done all your plotting, design and preparation and only then do you begin writing the first draft. As someone with a technical background, this makes a great deal of sense intellectually: you wouldn’t build a house without architectural plans, and I do outline my technical writing. Just not the fiction.

This method is at least notionally similar to the concept of mind mapping,* where you write a single word or concept in the centre of a page, draw annotated lines out from it representing major points, draw annotated lines out from them, and so on and so forth. Which in turn is similar to the idea of lists of lists, as found in productivity systems such as Getting Things Done. Essentially an hierarchical (or structure chart) representation with few high-level bits at the top and increasing numbers of lower-level bits as you go down. Very logical to anyone who’s studied Computer Science!

However, all my fiction to date has been achieved by pantsing, and I suspect it goes back to the creative writing lessons we did in English classes at school. They always gave us a writing prompt consisting of part of the opening sentence and told us to go nuts:

Forcing open the door of his mangled car, John staggered away just as…

Now tell me you couldn’t write ten pages from that prompt? I could, always have done and fast. I love it. This is what “writing fiction” has always been for me. But I don’t want to have my writing career defined as “great flash fiction writer — shame he never wrote a novel.” What’s worse, many prompts and ideas come to me in the same way. It’s rare that I remember my dreams, but when I do they either stick or I write them down in a notepad I keep beside my bed, or in the 14x9cm Moleskine I carry with me everywhere (it doubles as my To Do list, so it’s not all about writerly appearances).

The most recent dream-generated prompt I remember is simply, ‘You’re dying…’ From that I’ve somehow decided that this is the start of a science fiction mercenary story (I’m thinking Babylon 5 meets The Jackal), and I’m 5,000 words in and on the second scene. From here I could take this story in a thousand directions and could just continue writing it ad nauseum, but without structure, logic or a compass. In its own perverted way, this has led to indecision that has resulted in a kind of writers’ block: I have plenty of ideas but, because I don’t know where to go from here, I’m stuck!

This is where I’ve realised that this story has the potential to become a novel and I want to do it properly. Hence the Snowflake Method. Although I’m currently in the process of studying my first creative writing short course with the Open University, I don’t want to sit still. There is no rush, but I know the danger of allowing yourself to feel as though you’re never ready or that the timing is never right. I’ll finish this course first, then I’ll just do that course before I start. Besides, if this course does show me a better way to do this, I can always start again.

Right now I’m at Step 3 of the Snowflake Method — building the character summaries with name, one-sentence summary, motivation, goal, conflict, epiphany, and a one-paragraph summary based on all that — and I’m already beginning to see a way out of the pit of indecision. It may simply be the enthusiasm for a new methodology, but it seems that the characters are starting to take on their own lives and motivations, which in turn determines how they’ll react to given situations, and how those situations will resolve.

It’s too early to tell, but I have a sneaking suspicion that by doing all this preparation and design, you effectively end up with the writers’ equivalent of Choose Your Own Adventure: the characters will react in specific ways to any given circumstance (the rowdy guy will always choose the fight option, etc), and it effectively writes itself. I can’t wait to find out…

—
* If you want to give mind mapping a try, I’m a fan of the free multi-platform software, FreeMind. I don’t buy into the “tap into the unused 99% of your brain” pseudoscience that you sometimes see surrounding the technique, but it does seem to be an effective way of gathering and recording thoughts.

Writing Forums, Colonies & Communities

Flickr CC-BY publicdomainphotos

Ever since I first connected to the Internet in 1989, the month after it first became available to the general public, I have been using it as a social medium, in addition to its other manifold uses. Back then the social aspect was limited to a text-based chat client (ytalk), Usenet client (nn), and very basic email client (Elm or Pine) — which included mailing lists and newsletters — and, of course, no spam! If you weren’t online then, think of the anticipation that Google Wave is generating today, how there’s almost nobody using it and how everyone’s uncertain of whether it’s going to explode in popularity or quietly disappear.

Over time came the graphical WWW (via Mosaic in 1993), personal websites, free personal webmail and, while the popularity of email list-servers was enormous and growing, people began creating everything for web browsers. This included converting already existing applications, protocols and concepts to use in a browser — one of these was the re-invention of the mailing list as the WWW forum. Mailing lists are still popular, but seem to be more specialised and limited to more technically-savvy Internet users. Web forums are point-and-click, and they’re everywhere.

Today, just about everyone who uses the Internet is a member of at least one forum, and they have largely taken over mailing lists and the Usenet as places to ask questions, social centres and searchable repositories of information. There is a forum for just about any topic you could possibly imagine and, if you don’t want to go to the expense of hosting your own server or paying for a hosting provider to do it for you, there are advertising-sustained forum providers who will let you create a free forum within minutes.

Regardless of how the technology is implemented, the core idea and result has always been the same: to allow people interested in a certain topic to converse on threaded topics and, with the increasing ubiquity of effective Internet-wide search engines and their software robots, allow searching within fractions of a second. The writing community is no different. While they may vary in their approach, their rules, their levels and type of access, there are writing forums out there that cater for all genres and styles of writing.

I thought I’d write this post to give a brief background of forums and to share a list of some writing forums, though I’ve not necessarily joined them (I am a member of those marked with an asterisk):

• Author Advance*: Social network (with status updates), submission tracking, etc.
• Author’s Den
• BBC Writersroom*: The place to be if you want to write for BBC film, TV or radio.
• Crime Online
• The Dragon’s Inn
• Freelance Writing
• Great Writing*: Was formed from the BBC GetWriting project; releases contributor anthologies.
• Horror Writers UK
• Litopia Writer’s Colony*: Related to the Litopia podcasts.
• UKAuthors
• The Word Cloud
• Writelink
• Writersdock*: Offers community critiquing and writing prompts, among other things.
• Writertopia
• WriteWords
• Writing.com

While I very much hope these are helpful to you, I would appreciate it if you would add your favourite writing forums via the Comments at the bottom of this post. If I get a good response, I’ll look at editing this post to include your recommendations, and that should make this a useful post to new writers or writers who are new to the Internet.

Writing Markets

Early last year I realised that in order to maximise my chances of getting my work published I’d need to determine who published what, how to contact them and what to send them, i.e. publishers and submission guidelines.

You may assume that because it’s the 21st century (minus the jetpacks and moon base), to find such things you simply need to visit your favourite search engine, type a search string like…

SomePopularMagazine submission guidelines

…and up would pop that magazine’s submission guidelines page, and you could go about formulating your query, send it off and champagne would fall from the sky. Likewise, perhaps you don’t know what publications may print what you have written, so you find a markets website that provides you a list of publishers, what they accept and, in some cases, provides contact details and other critical information.

The problem is that most major publications do not put their submissions guidelines on their website and many markets websites are either light on the contents, out of date, or charge you a monthly or annual fee.

If you are in the UK or the USA there are two particularly good market websites: Writer’s Market and Writer’s Market UK (there are other large sites, but my understanding is that these two are typically the first port of call for most writers). However, this convenience comes at a cost: comparing like-for-like, the US website charges $39.99 per year and the UK website charges £25 per year. And if you publish around this globally-interconnected world, you may need to subscribe to a number of such sites.

But there is a cheaper, less technologically-advanced option. Believe it or not, these markets sites sell excellent printed copies of their directories. What’s more, they’re packed with the directory content for their own country and selected international publishers and markets, but also contain articles, guides, and information very helpful to people who are trying to break into a market or the industry as a whole. (As a site note, the Deluxe edition of Writer’s Market includes a year’s free membership to the website).

Yesterday I managed to buy myself a copy of both the 2010 editions of Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook (probably the oldest and best-respected UK directory) and Writer’s Market (US version) for less than what a subscription to one of the market websites would have cost me, delivered to my door.

If you’re in the position to be able to write such website subscriptions off on your tax return — or you’re prepared to make such an investment in your current position — then you have a powerful search tool at your disposal. Personally, I like to be able to flick through the book while I have my feet up on the sofa during writing downtime. It lets me note down a few good possibilities without taking up my keyboard time, which I prefer to reserve for writing where possible.