Category Archives: Writing

On the Writing Retreat, and Today's Space History Tidbit

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The writing retreat is working out well so far; in the last 24 hours, I’ve added 4000 words to the novel. MARE NUBIUM (THE SEA OF CLOUDS) is now about 95,000 words long. If I make it to 100K by the end of the weekend, I will have made my word count goal, but it looks as if the complete draft is going to be around 120K.

[break, break]

In today’s space history tidbit, 25 years ago today Space Shuttle COLUMBIA lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-9. The mission included astronauts John Young — one of the most experienced astronauts and a veteran of the Gemini and Apollo programs — Brewster Shaw, Owen Garriott, Robert Parker, Byron Lichtenberg, and Ulf Merbold, and was the first Spacelab mission.

And now you know.

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Progress Report: 90% Toward the Goal

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In football terms, I guess I’d be first-and-goal at the ten right now. Tonight I finished writing Chapter 17 and crossed the 90,000-word mark in my novel-in-progress. That gives me less than a week to crank out the last 10K if I’m going to make my word-count goal by the end of the month.

(Despite the fact that it’s November, I did not enroll in National Novel Writing Month. I knew there was no way I would crank out 50K in a month, so there’s no correlation between my writing progress and any NANOWRIMO standard.)

The problem right now is that I’m going to reach my word count goal without actually finishing the story. I expect when I hit 100K my characters will be deep in midst of handling ecology and equipment failures that will threaten the lunar colony, and it will take a couple of extra chapters to wrap up those threads. So I probably won’t actually finish the entire draft until the end of the year, at which point I will get to practice my blue-pencil skills on my own manuscript.

So, onward.

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Damaging Your Credibility as a Writer

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I went to a Public Relations & Marketing seminar this week in Chapel Hill, and had the pleasure of listening to a luncheon speech by Marty Clarke, author of COMMUNICATION LAND MINES. His web site is http://www.martyclarke.com/, and I highly recommend him — he’s a terrific speaker.

Marty asked whether or not we agreed that a single typographic error or misspelled word on a resume could prevent a person from getting a job interview. We all said, “Yes.” So he asked why we weren’t as careful with e-mail as we would be with a resume — with proofreading instead of just relying on the spell checker (“Spell check is your enemy,” he said), and doing whatever we can to ensure that the message we send out doesn’t inadvertently destroy our credibility.

I don’t recall the entire question exactly, but he asked something along the lines of, “How many of you have received an e-mail from someone higher up in your company and when you read it you thought, ‘How did you get to where you are if this is how you choke out a paragraph in your native language?'”

I ask the same thing sometimes with respect to some of the novel manuscripts I look at for Baen. I should ask those authors whose manuscripts are riddled with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors if they take as little care with their resumes. Because in this case the manuscript is their resume.

Then again, sometimes a gem of a story lies hidden inside a very rough manuscript — so I have to look beyond some pretty bad writing to see if the story itself is good. But I wish those writers would take a little more care to present themselves better — that they would polish that gem so it sparkled the first time I saw it.

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Space Technology Exports and Installations

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Two space-related items today: an article in New Scientist covers the illegal export of space technology to China, and the Space Shuttle crew plans to install a new toxic gas detector on the ISS.

First, from New Scientist: China denies attempting to get US space data. The story relates how Shu Quan-Sheng, a physicist born in China but now a naturalized US citizen, pled guilty to illegally exporting space technology to China: specifically, data on space launch vehicle technology.

This piqued my interest because I was a space technology security monitor for almost 3 years in the Defense Technology Security Administration. The NS article was heavy on Chinese denials, but light on their previous shenanigans (although it did link to an article with a list of a few previous items). Yet all they had to do was Google “Cox Commission Report” and downlink the file to learn about previous activities in which China obtained launch vehicle technology from U.S. corporations.

(I cross-posted this item in the Space Warfare Forum.)

Second, a link I got from Twitter: Astronauts to Install ENose Hazardous Gas Detector. The “ENose” detector is the latest version of a detector to warn station residents of dangerous levels of toxic gases.

I was interested in this item for two reasons. First, I used a variety of vapor detectors in my assignment as a Bioenvironmental Engineer at the AF Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards AFB, and I hope — but have some doubts that — the device will perform as advertised. I don’t doubt at all that it will work: it’s a polymer film detector based on electrical conductivity, more sophisticated than the old paper-tape, photosensitive detectors and certainly easier to use than some of the more complex, chemically-intensive instruments we had. I’m more concerned with its useful life, what happens if the detector medium gets saturated, that sort of thing.

But enough geeky reminiscing.

The second reason that story interested me is that two of the main characters in my novel (my work-in-progress) are environmental engineers who are trying to keep the new lunar colony alive — and detecting hazardous vapors is a big part of that job. I’m trying to get just enough realism in the novel to make it believable, without going to the geeky extreme. Hopefully, I’ll do a better job in the novel than I did in this blog post. :rolleyes:

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The Signs of Mediocre Writing

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My writing friend Allen Moore posted an entry in our “2004 Literary Boot Camp” forum in which he mentioned that most slush pile screeners look for the “first sign” of average writing. Understandably, that caught my attention and got me thinking.

I decided that I like the metaphor of “signs” of mediocre writing. (I like “mediocre” instead of “average” — the root of mediocre is the same as for medium … a middle value which accords with the arithmetic meaning of average — but in any case the idea is writing that is less than excellent.) As a slush reader, I see these signs over and over again.

So I told Allen and the Boot Camp gang that I actually look for the second sign of mediocre writing, and sometimes the third, rather than just the first. But I’m still young and naive as slush readers go, and old pros would probably chide me for reading any more than I have to.

So what are the signs of mediocre writing? This theory is still new, but so far this is what I’ve got:

The first sign is actually more a sign of terrible writing than of mediocre writing. It usually shows up within a page or two of a novel, and it’s a big flashy powered billboard that says, “I can’t complete a coherent sentence in the English language.” Manuscripts that display this sign are easy to evaluate. Note that this isn’t a question of the occasional misplaced comma or misspelled word; it’s an issue of basic coherence, the inability to transmit a comprehensible thought.

The second sign is more like a yard sale sign or a political sign stuck in the front yard; it comes a little later in the manuscript, but sometimes within the first chapter. This sign says, “I’m not sure what story I want to tell, and I don’t want to think deeply or do any research to make my writing believable, so I’m going to toss in a whole bunch of extraneous stuff and hope you like some of it.” These manuscripts are pretty easy to evaluate, too — especially if the extraneous stuff is more interesting than the central story. (Another, similar sign that I sometimes see says, “I didn’t bother to check to see if you publish this kind of story.” Those manuscripts are also easy to evaluate.)

The third sign of mediocre writing is smaller still, and harder to read without getting close to it. It might show up by the end of the first chapter, but often it stays hidden through a couple of chapters — and sometimes a writer will keep it hidden until a third or halfway through the book. This sign says, “I like what I’m writing and I hope you do, too. I have no idea that my characters seem a little flat; or, I’m not aware that my story arc is too derivative; or, I don’t know if you already looked at three other novels based on this same idea; or, I don’t realize that this scene is simply unbelievable; or, I’m ignorant of the fact that I just contradicted something I wrote fifty pages ago.” (Now you see why this stupid sign is so bloody hard to read: the writing is terrifically small.) These manuscripts are the hardest to evaluate, because sometimes they could be fixed with a little extra work; unfortunately, publishers generally don’t have time to help new writers fix all the problems to produce a marketable book.

So those are the signs I’ve found so far. I’m interested in other signs or variations on these, if anyone else has any to contribute.

As for me, that third sign is the one I’m trying hardest to eliminate in my own writing … although I know I still have the second sign up in some places. I’m trying to knock that one down, too, because any sign that my writing is less than excellent means my manuscript won’t get noticed.

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Logging Some Forward Progress on My Novel

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It feels good to get some writing done, and be a little closer to completion on MARE NUBIUM. Since my unanticipated hiatus, I’ve pushed my self-imposed deadline back from Halloween to the first of December — and if I make it, I will meet my goal of completing the novel this year.

And as of today, the thing is a little over 75,000 words long. I still think this draft is going to run over my planned 100,000 words, and therefore will need some trimming in the edit, but so far I feel pretty good about it. Hopefully other people will feel good about it, too!

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Book Preview: DREAMING CREEK by Edmund R. Schubert

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Announcing Edmund R. Schubert’s first novel, DREAMING CREEK, now available from Amazon.com.

High school teacher Danny Wakeman has spent sixteen years believing that his childhood friend, Marcus Gaines, saved his life after an accident. But Danny’s perspective on the world gets turned inside-out when he and the woman he wants to marry, Sara McBride, drink from the mystical waters of Dreaming Creek, trade bodies, and get stuck that way… Trapped in each others’ bodies, struggling to fit in to each others’ lives, Danny and Sara will have to pull together to overcome a perplexing lawsuit, a plot to defraud Danny out of his recently deceased parent’s farm, and an attempted rape—all of which ultimately prove to bear Marcus’s sinister fingerprints. And before it’s over, Danny will discover that this pattern of treachery and violence goes all the way back to his supposed accident, which Marcus designed to cover up an even blacker secret…

Who is Edmund Schubert, and why am I plugging his novel? That’s simple:

Edmund R. Schubert is the award-winning author of over thirty short stories, having been published in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain. In addition to writing, Schubert has held a range of editorial positions, including serving as fiction editor of the online magazine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. An anthology of IGMS stories, co-edited by Schubert and Card, was published by Tor (August, 2008).

In the interest of full disclosure, Ed Schubert is also one of my buddies from Orson Scott Card’s 2004 Literary Boot Camp, and he let me read parts of DREAMING CREEK as he got them ready for his publisher. And, in my not-so-humble opinion, it’s very well done.

DREAMING CREEK can be ordered from Amazon, as mentioned, or directly from the publisher, LBF Books.

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Book Review: BEAUTY AND DYNAMITE by Alethea Kontis

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If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve posted this review four days ago, on Alfred Nobel’s birthday.* Since he invented dynamite, of course. But my wits are often everywhere except about me.

Not so with Alethea and her collection of essays, BEAUTY AND DYNAMITE. Her wits never seem to leave her, and the result is delightful.

(Full disclosure: Alethea is a most charming young lady whom I count as a friend as well as a colleague. If you think my review may be biased as a result, I can only say: you may be right. After all, she actually included the gibberish I contributed, giving me probably my only opportunity to be listed in the same table of contents as John Ringo.)

BEAUTY AND DYNAMITE is primarily a collection of Alethea’s essays for Apex Digest, with a smattering of poetry, blog entries, and “How I Met Alethea”-type entries from a few of the many, many friends she has made as a “genre chick.”

I could relate quite well to Alethea’s notes about Orson Scott Card’s Literary Bootcamp, since I went through the bootcamp experience a year after she did. My interview subject wasn’t nearly as interesting as hers: That lady felt free to share her remarkable story with Alethea, no doubt because she knew Alethea would appreciate the story she had to tell. That quality is one thing that makes Alethea such a perfect fit in the publishing world: she appreciates the stories and the act of story-telling itself.

And she tells good stories, even when she’s not the star. She was able, for instance, to shine the spotlight on Sherrilyn Kenyon as she wrote about their time together at a convention, and on the grand dame of science fiction, Andre Norton, as she wrote about visiting her home and library.

Some of the essays, because they deal with more heartache and hurt than happiness, are harder to read than others. But they all share a singular virtue: they express truth as the real world presents it to us, and growth as we deal with the world on our own terms. They are beauty, and they are dynamite.

To order a copy of BEAUTY AND DYNAMITE, visit Apex Books.

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*Actually, if I’d had my wits about me, I’d have posted this review right after Labor Day. I finished the book while I was at Dragon*Con, after all — holding it up in front of me where a thousand or so people walked by and saw it. Oh, and Alfred Nobel was born October 21, 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Writing Again: The First 100 Words Are the Hardest

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(At least, I hope they are.)

So last night I opened the file that is MARE NUBIUM, my novel-in-progress, and reintroduced myself to it after three weeks of family priorities and office (i.e., work-at-home) overload. I’m almost caught up with my university work, and still a little behind on my reading for Baen, but I want to start ramping up my writing again while I continue to catch up.

I was afraid that I would read something in my work that would make me involuntarily hurl my computer through the window, but I didn’t. I count that as a positive indicator.

And when all was written and done, I’d added 168 words to the manuscript. Not much, I know, but enough that I felt my time was well spent. Tonight I’ll try for a few hundred more, and we’ll see how it goes.

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A Little Nuclear Detection History, and a Big Gripe

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Forty-five years ago today, the first nuclear detonation detection satellites, Vela-1 and Vela-2, were launched from the Eastern Space & Missile Center. Considering the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons, NUDET is as vital today as it ever was, and those spacecraft paved the way for the capabilities we have now. Just thought you’d like to know.

Now for my gripe.

It’s really not that big a gripe, despite the title above. It’s based on the trials of the write-submit-receive rejection-submit again cycle. I can’t gripe about the cycle itself; it’s part and parcel of the business of writing. But sometimes ….

Here’s the story: Back on August 23rd, I submitted for the first time an essay entitled, “An Unsolicited Proposal for the Next Secretary of Education.” It was rejected, and since then it’s been submitted and rejected two more times and is currently in review at a fourth venue. With every submission, I’ve tried to tell the editorial staff that this is a timely piece, and last night’s Presidential debate proved me right.

Referring to education, both candidates pointed out the difficult situation in the Washington, DC, school system. That’s great, but it irritated me because one of the central tenets of my essay had to do with establishing a model school in DC.

😡 Timing is everything, and once again it’s something I don’t have.

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