textiplication.com

In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, if a little late…

The Right Word

By Skott Klebe

I am the king of timing.

Take this morning, for instance.  Zexic, Inc.’s annual shareholders’ meeting, about two hundred people in a dark auditorium listening to the careful whitewashing of a mediocre quarter. You remember when the CEO, Craig what’s-his-name, Blank, was saying, “…we continue to reap great benefits from leveraging our unique technology…”, blah di fucking blah. I know, you don’t remember it, because who can ever remember that kind of crap?

But suppose he’d said, “…we continue to reap great benefits from leveraging alien technology.”  You’d remember that, wouldn’t you? Suppose he hadn’t even noticed he’d said that? Suppose that every time he used the word “technology,” he’d kept on saying “alien technology,” up to the moment when Zexic, Inc.’s board chairman dragged him off the stage and kicked him to death?

You’d remember that, wouldn’t you?

That was one approach I considered, believe me. Would have had much of the desired effect, plus giving me the opportunity to laugh my ass off. Which I would also have enjoyed. I mean, imagine it: “Excuse me sir, is this your ass?” “Thanks, I must have dropped it while I was laughing so hard!”

And I could have pulled it off, mind you, but it was too early in the presentation, and too strange. It’s not like I was going to follow Craig Blank around for the rest of his life, making him say ‘alien’ all the time, right? The minute I’m out of the room, Craig’s all normal again, probably trying to figure out what happened. I can’t change what he thinks, only what he says.

Instead, I chose a more, uh, minimalist approach. I waited for the CFO’s speech, and then, every time he mentioned a financial result or projection, or any other time I sensed the opportunity, I simply made him add the word “not.” You do remember that, don’t you?

CFO: as expected, Zexic’s Northeast new-customer sales did…

ME: …NOT…

CFO: …not meet forecasts. Zexic fared similarly in Southeast, …

ME: …NOT…

CFO: …not succeeding against the aggressive targets set by comparison to the prior year. On the other side of the ledger, cost-control measures were…

ME: …NOT…

CFO: …not successful, so we did…

ME: …NOT…

CFO: … not achieve our goal of four percent reduction in G&A. In the end….

You get the picture. Timing, I tell you, is everything.

You know how it turned out, of course — Craig Blank chases the CFO off the stage, takes over the presentation, then proceeds to muff the very same details as his loyal CFO? I couldn’t have planned that. Priceless. Well, actually, not priceless.  Zexic plummeted from 54¾ to 12½ in about an hour. I covered my short sale at 18, then when it got to 13 I bought again, because at that price they were probably undervalued. So I’ll collect twice on that one. Quit drooling, junior, it’s not the time for you to call your trader just yet. Put down your phone and listen.

So just stipulate that I have fabulous timing, OK? That, and I can also make anyone, anyone at all, say exactly one word whenever I want.

ME: …RUTABAGA…

“Rutabaga.”

See? You weren’t planning to say the word ‘rutabaga,’ were you? You can’t stop me, either, even when you’re expecting it.

ME: …RUTABAGA…

“Rutabaga.”

See? No, sit down, damn it, I’m not done with you yet. I’m telling you this for a reason, and you are, by God, going to hear me out. I don’t walk around telling everyone that I manipulate shareholder meetings of public companies for personal gain, and I wouldn’t be telling you now without a damn good reason.

I’ve told you I’ve got a couple of things going for me, and there’s one more: besides this freakish little power, and fucking awesome timing, I’m also a pretty good listener. So when the maitre d’ put me at that table right next to yours, and I could see two things: the back of your head, and your friend Rita’s face. And a nice face that was, maybe not Hollywood beautiful but pretty, and intelligent, plus the added bonus that she never once took her eyes off you the whole time you were eating. I could also overhear what you both were saying, and, as I said, I’m a damn good listener.

So what did I hear? I heard the things you said, all about ROI and zeta and beta and all that crap that you legitimate investors think is so important. I heard all the things Rita said, which were all about how amazing you are, and how great you are, and how right you are about everything, except when she corrected you on that paragraph in the 10Q, which, by the way, you obviously didn’t read before you came here, schmuck. And you slapped her down, said it wasn’t relevant, said you thought she was misreading it, la di fucking da. Made her feel like dirt. And you’re like what, twenty-six? You’re not married, you’re probably working forty thousand hours a week. You have no life but money. Listen to me, you arrogant little shit. You know what you are?

ME: …dork…

“Dork.”

Exactly. I thought about fixing it for you, making you seem a little more friendly. I thought about giving you that one right word, here and there, to make everything all right. Maybe I make you a little more affectionate, and I continue to help you out here and there; you don’t know why it’s happening, but you find you and Rita are liking each other just a little bit more, until maybe you get to be a little bit more than friends.

Might be more than you deserve, but it seems like it would make Rita happy. At least for a while. But I know where that would have put you, not knowing where the words were coming from, not knowing why you were saying them: in the end, you wouldn’t trust yourself, and in particular you wouldn’t trust yourself around Rita, so you’d fuck it up. And rightly so. That’s why I don’t indulge in that kind of crap any more.

Listen, man, I’ve got one word for you. Trust, man, it’s all about trust. That’s why I’m leveling with you here, why I’m telling you to clean up your shit instead of doing it for you. Trust.

Me, I’m done with trust. Can’t hack it. I keep thinking, what if I’m not the only one of me around? Suppose that there are people out there who can do two words? Or three at a time?

God, what I could do with three words. I’d be the fucking President of the U.S. of A., right now. And I do mean the fucking president, know what I mean?

But you, man, you have a chance. Forget this zeta, beta crap. Buy, sell, short, long, put, call, oh, my fucking God, what terrible words. Get some new ones.

ME: …TRUST…

“Trust.”

ME: …HOPE…

“Hope.”

ME: …LOVE…

“Love.”

Hey, man, those are some great words! Give ‘em a shot, why don’t you? Before it’s too late.

Look, she’s coming back. The rest is up to you — we never had this little chat, right?

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6429710.html

via Andrew Wheeler. Publisher’s Weekly talks to Robert J. Sawyer:

When asked if traditional SF has “jumped the shark,” …Sawyer responds, “If it had just jumped the shark, that would be fine — at least people would understand what that means. But no. SF has instead executed a parabolic maneuver with an exemplar of the cartilaginous order Selachii at its focus…”

I think that this observation is fair but incomplete. It’s a daunting prospect to get a non-genre reader to read some of the best hard SF I’ve read lately. Take Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City, for instance. It’s not difficult because of any problems with Alastair’s beautiful prose, by any means, but because he’s writing for an audience that’s familiar with genre tropes such as generation ships, cryogenic suspension, nanotech, alien biologies, and bioengineering. He has to assume a certain familiarity with base concepts in order to be able to get to the really mind-stretching stuff he wants to write about. Also, it’s not just the reading that’s challenging; the level of base knowledge required to write effective high-end SF is enormous. Some writers who have excelled at the highest levels of physics-oriented hard SF have embarrassing difficulty writing about elementary levels of computer technology. Those who talk abstruse physics and software equally well are extremely rare. Stross, Vinge, Schroeder? Peter Watts. Not that you have to do both - I don’t get the impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is all that interested in software, for instance, which doesn’t mean that RGB Mars is terribly accessible to people without engineering backgrounds or a lifetime of SF reading behind them.

So if there is a selachian being jumped, it’s a bioengineered human-shark hybrid with carbon-nanotube-reinforced cartilage and a brain augmented with rod logic and protected by a synthetic diamond skull. There you go, a fascinating novel to be written that won’t be comprehensible to the majority of Americans who buy lottery tickets.

The PW article recounts different publisher reactions to the movement of SFF-themed publications out of the genre section. Strategies range from defending the genre by trying hard to keep your best writers in it (DelRey) to leveraging contemporary noir fantasy, particularly for women (Ace/Roc), to working to move your top writers out into the mainstream (Eos, particularly ones named Neil or Neal).

None of the publishers seem to be thinking about the Boingers or Second Lifers.

Tobias Buckell is talking about Scrivener again, a completely cool writing application for Macs only.  Of course, he’s actually asking for Windows equivalents to Scrivener, but that just shows the poverty of the landscape on the Windows platform.

I’ve got an edge recommendation for any writer who works on more than one machine: Google Documents, formerly the Writely word processor. It’s relatively barebones, but I love it - wherever I work, on whatever machine, even one I’ve never used before, there it is, documents and all. No syncing, no trusting a thumb drive (or having to remember it), nothing that gets in the way of the writing. Oh, and every single edit you ever make is saved and versioned.
I find that Zoho takes too long to load, anywhere but my home connection. Also, I trust Google’s infrastructure.
There’s a 500K limit on doc size, which means chapter-by-chapter management for novels, and no headers or footers (since it prints from a browser window, you get the browser header/footer whether you want them or not). Manuscript format means saving as Word or RTF.
Sure, you’re trusting Google with your data, but a) they’re not going to steal your work and publish it themselves, and b) do you really think you’re going to have more reliable storage than they will?
I’d still take Scrivener if I could get it. Or ZenGobi, (www.zengobi.com). Hell, I’d take TextMate.

I never, ever thought I’d be jealous of all the great software available on the Mac and not on the PC.  An unforeseen consequence of running Unix under the hood - creative programmers want to work on it.

I was thinking about the following bit from this post on Jennifer Jackson’s blog:

Despite the fact that nearly everywhere on the internet that my submission guidelines appear it says that I prefer snail mail to electronic queries (last night I nearly killed myself trying to read an email that had the teensy tiniest font ever and all the carriage returns stripped out), I am now getting them in a ratio of 1:2, respectively.

and realized I was thinking something like this:

Well, why do you prefer snail mail when the authors obviously prefer e-mail? Wouldn’t it easier if you switched?

or somesuch goofballery.  It suddenly occurred to me that a lot of prospective writers’ questions on Miss Snark, Evil Editor, and so on carry an implicit assumption that the author is the agent’s customer.  It’s an easy trap to fall into - the author thinks of the agent as providing a service, so the agent should be hopping to provide good service — defined as, of course, whatever the author wants.

But this is exactly backwards.  Authors are not the agent’s customers - they are the agent’s suppliers!  Authors try to provide agents with goods they can sell; agents try to provide editors with goods that they will want to buy. 

Authors, if this doesn’t seem right to you, look at how the money flows: to you! You don’t send money to the agent - the editor pays you for your work, and the agent holds part of that out.  No fees, no retainers.

Customers deliver money, they don’t receive it.  Suppliers receive money in exchange for goods that customers want.  That means it’s the author’s responsibility to write the right kind of query letter, get the agent’s name right, format it the right way, and print the darn thing out and stick it in a stamped envelope if that’s what the agent wants.  Complain all you want, but if you were making widgets you’d still have to package and ship them in the way that the customer wanted.

Of course, I’m not saying I don’t feel a little twinge — query letters are the only letters I’ve actually put stamps on in probably ten years, so yes, it’s not the most convenient thing for me. 

But I’m not the customer.

I’ve posted before about my completed novel, Knave of Yes, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted any excerpts.  Here, in honor of Boskone, the first couple hundred words:

———————————-

I was proclaiming revolution in Kalida Market when they came for me, the King’s war wizard in a plume of fire and Count Withn bearing my death sentence in his hand. As the crowd ran screaming from the guardsmen’s swords and Lord Helm’s flame, Lord Withn unfurled the black-ribboned parchment and began to read. In the rolling voice in which he announced hangings, burnings, and harvest festivals, he said, “Owen Barker, called the Jest, you are condemned in the King’s name, charged with inciting riot and with treason in words and deeds. King Mollow has decreed the penalty of death.”

Lord Helm’s voice was a shuddering rumble. “I have come to see you do not cheat the gallows, Jest. You have evaded Lord Withn’s guards before, but you will not escape me.” The Count and all his guardsmen looked small beside him; he was huge, a foot taller than even I stand, and twice my weight. Fire licked up and down his body.

I sidled over to a fruitseller’s cart. “Evade? Escape? You mistake me entirely,” I said, palming a handful of limes. “On the contrary, I’ve been waiting half the day to sing you my new song.” I began to juggle the limes.

I’m focusing on a new writing project, WIP name Folds.  It’s contemporary YA fantasy about three friends (yes, that again) who grow up together in an imaginary small suburb of Boston, living mostly normal lives in between teleporting from coast to coast, filling a nearby forest with life forms of their own creation, and working with the government to fight off an implacable alien horde. 

You mean sort of like Harry Potter meets Puppet Masters?

Typical slice-of-life, coming of age story, in short.  One of them travels through time. Another one lives in a cathedral. The third one moved away and none of them wanted her to go.

I didn’t write much say much about Knave while I was writing it, out of superstition or whatever, but I’m going to post a bit about Folds while it’s coming-to-be.

In planning Folds I’m trying several things that I didn’t in Knave:

1. Third person limited voice.  I loved doing the shifting first-person POV in Knave, especially when my narrators were all in the same room at the same time trying to figure out what the others are doing.  First person is tough, though.  I had originally intended to alternate between two narrators, but then I needed to show what the King was up to. One of my narrators couldn’t get into the castle, and the other one lived there but was deaf and couldn’t hear what was going on, so I wound up adding a third narrator.  That was really good, in the end, as the third POV character eventually became my favorite, and even wound up taking over the ending of the book, but… I’d like to play with a different set of challenges this time.
2. Lots of really short chapters.  Knave is eleven chapters and 72K words, so an average chapter is more than six thousand words.  Chapters in Folds are shorter units, averaging a little more than a thousand words. 
3. Contemporary setting and the challenges of normal life (school life, parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, college,careers) as well those of as fantasy life (getting to San Francisco when you’re twelve and only have a couple of hours to spare, fighting implacable alien hordes, etc.). 

The CSGJAC workshop reviewed the first chapter of Knave and handed me a thick pile of feedback, much positive, much substantive.  Jeff Carver in particular is a very careful reader and editor, and I incorporated nearly all of his recommendations in a further draft.  I thought I’d update the spreadsheet after this round:

There was some consensus that the first chapter was too long, which surprised me; it’s now shorter by about five pages, and much tighter.  The chart shows that I’ve dropped a couple of chapters since the last pic; the Works chapter went away during the Great Funicular Purge, and the Moonlight chapter, always too short, got shorter and wound up part of the Mothers chapter. 

Big question: if Chapter 1 was too long at ~7500 words, how will people react to chapter 8?

Apex Digest is an excellent sf/horror magazine, and it needs some help.  You can buy raffle tickets here, or just subscribe.  I subscribed, and I may buy some raffle tickets, too.

Ruby on Rails folks may notice that the Apex store site is running on Shopify, Tobias Luettke’s Rails-based e-commerce host.  How cool is that?

is a word I just made up to describe the process of removing from a fantasy novel a chapter about attacking and disabling a funicular (Wikipedia definition; many cool pictures, including the one below at the right).  In other words, a process I just went through.

I’d really been looking forward to the funicular sabotage chapter.  Great opportunity to forward the revolution, develop the relationship between two of the primary characters, cool magic-engineering tech.  And there’s no reason you can’t have a funicular in a Renaissance-era story with metallurgical magic. Take a look at page 31 of Philip Ball’s wonderful biography of Paracelsus, The Devil’s Doctor (click on the link that’s on page 31).  There are some marvelous woodcuts of huge, intricate mining machinery from the fifteenth century, built and used entirely without the aid of metallurgical magic!  The main obstacle to creating a really useful heavy-cargo funicular using Renaissance engineering would have to be the rails; slap on a little metallurgical magic and off you go! 

But, darn it all, the contrast was just too great.  The book already flows well without the chapter I wanted to add; the funicular attack was just so dramatic, it deserved to be the climax of the book, not a relationship-building exercise that gets tossed aside as soon as it’s done.

Hey, Tita, you want to go blow up the funicular?

Ven, you romantic dog! Just let me grab my purse!

So I completed the defuniculation last night.  Started the evening at 76K words, with the prospect of 80K before me; now I’m down to 73K, probably ending at 78K.  I’ve started to move some of the less funicular-specific good stuff into other chapters.  The great thing about novel-writing is how much good stuff can just spring into existence while you’re working out other things.  I probably did as much prep work for this chapter as I had done for all of the rest of the book combined.  I drew maps of the city to figure out where the funicular would go; I designed the workings of the funicular, invented magical terminology for metalworking, and plotted not one, but two strategies for attacking the funicular (as well as a counterattack that derailed (as it were) the first attack.  And, for all that planning and outlining, what I loved about most about the chapter were the following lines:

“May I also introduce Tita Panteknika, an accomplished [air wizard] who will be assisting us today.”

Cirapo snorted.  “An [air wizard]? I did not know we were planning to murder anyone today.  I would have worn different clothes.”

If you had any idea how much those two lines did to support later events, ah, well, you might like them as much as I do.  And there’s no way I had known they would crop up until I wrote them.

So I thought that I would lay down a couple of Writing Laws that I’ve learned to date.

First Law: The writer makes the rules. 

Corollary: The writer doesn’t break the rules; the writer changes the rules.

In other words, I don’t have to have a funicular if I don’t want one.  The only person who thought that a funicular would look good running along the southern border of Heathness was me.  I think that there’s another law lurking in this experience, though:

Second Law: No good novel was ever improved by the late addition of a funicular.

In other words, a funicular is too cool a thing to be a seasoning on the dish; it’s got to be the meat.  So, someday, you may see Knave of the Funicular from me, if everything works out.  Knave of Yes, though, will have to do without one.

Well, not too, too, novel, since I tried it after reading Justine Larbalestier’s fascinating post on her use of spreadsheets to track important metrics of her ongoing writing process.

Now that I’ve gotten to the end of Knave of Yes (my first novel), and halfway through it again in a second pass, I went through the same exercise:

It was very interesting.  I learned a couple of things:

• I have three POV’s, and I had been concerned that I was favoring one of them over the others.  It turns out that the three are as balanced, chapter by chapter, as they could be.
• I’d been aware that my chapter length was all over the map, and that turned out to be the case; however, two of the chapters I’d thought were the longest are, in fact, not; I’d also forgotten that one of the key chapters is still somewhat underwritten.  I would have gotten to it next, but this really makes it stand out.
• I’d been concerned that I might have too high an ongoing level of action, but my quick, subjective 1-4 *’s metric shows a pretty nice balance. 

I don’t think anything I learned was terribly surprising, but I think that this kind of breakdown can only help.