BayCon 2012 – A Terribly Long Review

BayCon in Santa Clara is my local big lit con, and I’ve been going to it, on and off, for many years. This year, my partner gave me the gift of being able to spend all the time I want to at the con without having to worry about the dog or anything else. What a precious gift! I was happy to take him up on it since the Guest of Honor was one of my favorite epic fantasy authors, Brandon Sanderson.

Brandon Sanderson at CONduit 17 in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While I’m still too… shy? to actually go up and talk with him, I hoped to be able to attend a panel or two that he’d be on and get a chance to hear him talk about his process. I under-estimated a bit.

In the week before the con, the con staff posted the schedule and descriptions of all the panels. For whatever reason, they did not include the names of the participants. No problem, I’d just circle the ones that interested me and figure out how to make sure to hit a Brandon panel after I got the program book. Once I got to the con, picked up my program book, and started scanning the panel participants, I realized that just about every interesting writing-focused panel had Brandon as a participant. Great, now I’m stalking the Guest of Honor.

I’m going to write a bit more in-depth about the panels I attended, but in general, I had a pretty fantastic con, the best con experience I’ve had in many years. I don’t know what enabled me to enjoy this one so much, though I suspect that my flying it solo with no responsibilities played a large part. I was there for me, and was not worrying about what anyone else might think about the panels I wanted to go to, or if they were getting bored in the panel I was fascinated by. I think this is key, and I need to remember it. Sometimes, “me time” is good and healthy.

Friday

Friday started off with a panel about “Irreproducible Results” in science and featured one of my favorite San Diego fans and all around creativity dynamo, Allison Lonsdale. It also featured the publisher of the “Journal of Irreproducible Results“. The panelists were quite witty and entertaining, and talked about some important themes, like using fancy statistics tricks to bend the results of science in profitable ways, and preying on people who just don’t understand what science is all about.

After that I hit the “Ghostwriting–Literally!” panel, which featured several authors (including Brandon) who have picked up finishing off works started by other famous authors. There were many interesting observations about voice and paying homage without coming across as a parody.

For my last panel slot of the day, I had several choices. I stated off at one called “Character Slam Books,” curious about what that meant. When they started handing out pens and little journals, I realized it was more of a workshop than I felt like dealing with. So I wound up ditching that and heading to the “Old Star Trek vs. J.J. Abram’s Refresh” panel. I’m a sucker for anything Star Trek, but on reflection, I might have passed on that one. There wasn’t really anything new discussed (other than apparently Khan will be featured in the upcoming installment), and the audience was full of socially-challenged Trek nerds. Now, I am a socially-challenged Trek nerd, but I still understand that Star Trek was fiction. I’m not so sure about some of the people who were my fellow audience members.

Saturday

Saturday was a great day. I started off at a panel on “Self-Promotion & Publicity for Writers” which was simultaneously fascinating and a cause for concern. The major publishers are really not figuring out this new world they suddenly find themselves in, and are doing less and less for the author, spending less and less on publicity, editing, and just about everything. Authors now can no longer focus just on writing, they need to learn how to self-promote. The panel gave a lot of good ideas, and wound up connecting in interesting ways with an ePublishing panel I would attend later in the day.

Next was a panel on “Styles of Writing” which, led by Brandon, focused on technical aspects of writing around viewpoints: first or third person (don’t do second!), limited or omniscient, past tense or present (or maybe even future), stuff like that. I knew most of the material, but it was enjoyable listening to the pros talk about how they decide which style to use for a given work.

After that was the “Guest of Honor” interview, starring you-kn0w-who, and it turns out that Brandon tells great stories when talking as well as in print. He gave a very entertaining rendition of how he was selected to finish up the Wheel of Time series by the original author’s widow, and he talked about how he broke into publishing to begin with. He was anything but the “sell the first novel he wrote” kind of author. In fact, he had written something like twelve novels before selling any of them. To me, that’s determination and patience. I need to emulate that better.

The next panel was supposed to be about ePublishing, but turned out to be a discussion of a new thing in the writerly world, author co-ops and their influence in the market. This panel featured several members of Book View Cafe, a writing and publishing co-op originally founded by a large number of women writers who all knew bits and pieces of how to get published, but no one person knew everything. They found that by forming a co-op, they could collectively cover all aspects of publishing and promotion for their members. They’ve since grown, adding men, and have turned into an ePublishing house as well, and are now venturing into the world of print publishing. In a day where anyone can put up a novel on Kindle, iBookStore, or nook, and a time when the big publishing houses are doing less and less (as noted before), they are charting a new gatekeeper role.

I ended my panels for the day at one called “Aspiring Writers Toolkit” which turned out to be mostly about critiquing groups, writing workshops, and other ways to get feedback on your work. I found it fascinating, and more so because a friend who had a conflicting panel asked me to take notes. I’ve been a member of an awesome critiquing group (the Penny Dreadfuls in San Diego), and it helped improve my writing a great deal. But I know my experience is kind of rare. I would love to find a similar group here in the Bay Area when the time is right, but finding such a group can be very difficult. I got a lot of links to blogs and other sites.

After meeting up with my guy and finding dinner, we both attended Allison Lonsdale’s concert and had a great time. It’s a pity (for the audience) that she only had an hour! She played a number of old favorites, and a good number of songs that were new to us. Every time she plays at BayCon the audience seems to grow a little, which is great news.

Sunday

Sunday was my downer day. It seemed that many of the panels I attended lacked the focus of the days earlier. It started off with a visit with Michael to the Dealers Room. We made a few purchases (a CD that I’ve been unable to find elsewhere, a DVD, a couple of books including David Gerrold‘s Worlds of Wonder which had been mentioned in a previous panel, and I’m finding entirely fascinating so far). I also ran into some friends I hadn’t seen in a while and got to talking with some other con attendees who were saying it was one of the worst BayCons they had ever attended. When I expressed surprise, since I’d been having a great con, I found out that they don’t go to panels, they were looking for good social activities, which apparently were lacking this year. An interesting perspective.

Then, off to the panels.

First off was a panel titled “Self Publishing Food Chain” which explored the place that self publishing has in the brave new world. It used to be that self-publishing was called, derisively, “vanity press”. Publishing with a vanity press was a mark that your work wasn’t good enough for a “real” publisher and you were willing to pay someone to publish your books. Not so much these days. The advent of affordable “print on demand” services, the growth of more independent publishing houses, and lately the ability to publish your work electronically, through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookStore, and many other places all add up to an explosion of new venues. Some people are making mad money self-publishing (just look at Amanda Hocking for one), thus completely demolishing many of the old beliefs. And while you have to do a LOT more of the promotion work, you also get to keep a much higher percentage of the cover price. The problem is, with this explosion of self-publishing, how do you find what’s worth reading. While this panel didn’t solve the problems, it did give many perspectives on how some people are taking advantage of it.

Next up was “The Future of WesterCon.” WesterCon, for those not in the know, is a travelling convention, which is awarded by the vote of members of a prior WesterCon, to the people who can make the best case for hosting the convention in their city. The limit is that it must be in what is broadly defined as “the Western region of the United States.” In times past, the convention has been well attended and a “big deal”. But in the last couple of decades, with the remarkable growth of local conventions like BayCon, WesterCon has lost a lot of its allure, along with a large percentage of its annual attendance. This panel explored, along with its very small audience, the reasons for this decline, and what can be done about it. There is hope. Last year, a very lack-luster bid led to a “hoax” bid being accepted, and even winning. But the guys behind the hoax have decided to fully commit to bringing back the awesome. That would be great, and I’m looking to be involved. But at the panel, I was somewhat disheartened. I asked several times what makes WesterCon special, what is it’s draw that would cause people to want to invest in airline tickets and hotel rooms, and the answer I kept hearing was “it’s a chance to hang out with fans from other cities.” I’m sorry, this is not a draw for me. I want something truly unique, something that only WesterCon offers. And now, there is nothing that fits that bill. This was the big downer for the day as I realized that what draws me to conventions is not shared by the people running WesterCon.

This was followed by a bit more GoH stalking, a panel on “World Building Basics.” I found this panel to be rather disorganized. The moderator was not a very strong moderator, there were tech issues, and instead of keeping the panel focused, the moderator just let everyone wander around. I had hoped to get some insights into things like “what parts of world building are crucial, what parts are simply nice to have?”, and “how do you know when you’ve done enough world building for your genre?” Just like with Role-Playing Games, one can spend so much time world-building that no actual game is run, or no real writing gets done. I had hoped to hear a bit more about this process, but instead it devolved into discussions of language building and real-world examples of cultures that were technologically inferior to other cultures and how they inevitably were destroyed (as a refutation of the “noble savage” trope).

I then attended a panel on “The Heroine’s Quest“, a topic I found interesting after a church member gave a similar talk a few weeks ago. It’s a good thing that I had attended that talk since the panel never really reviewed what this story structure, the feminine version of the “Hero’s Journey”, is all about. They instead started off by naming examples of works that featured the Heroine’s Journey structure without explicitly drawing the parallel. “Yep, that one hits all the buttons!” There was some discussion about how the “Maid, Mother, Crone” figures sometimes ties into the Journey. And, of course, there was a lot of talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how it does and doesn’t match the bullet points of the Journey. As I was listening, I found myself wondering if gender-based hero myths are something to simply acknowledge, or something to try to abolish. Should there be one heroic journey and the gender of the participant irrelevant, or is this an area where gender distinctions are still a good thing? And how should it be addressed in an age where gender is seen as a lot more fluid than it ever has in the past? But, given the remarks made by the panelists, I felt safer not asking my questions.

Finally, I attended a panel that asked the question, “What Makes Hard Science Fiction ‘Hard’”. Another very disorganized and unfocused panel, and the gist of it wound up being that for a hard science fiction fan, if it was a work they liked, it was “hard science” but if it was a work they did not like, it wasn’t. I know there are supposedly other definitions for the term “hard science fiction,” but the fans on the panel each gave examples of works they considered to be hard science that obviously broke those definitions. (Honor Harrington, while I find to be very entertaining military sci-fi, is anything but “hard” with its FTL and it’s telepathy.) I wound up feeling confused and disappointed by the panel.

Monday

I hit three panels on Monday. First up was “Top 10 Rookie Author Gaffes” and it was another Brandon panel. I wound up sitting next to a friend who is another aspiring writer, and I think we both enjoyed it. I took a bunch of notes, which is kind of rare for a panel. The speakers talked about gaffes with writing (you actually have to start writing if you want to publish, who’d have thunk?), researching, and eventually publishing and promoting. All of them had great stories to tell (“Oh, man, whatever you do, don’t do what I did!”) and while entertaining, they were also very instructive.

Following that was supposed to be a panel on “Unblocking Your Own Potential” which was supposed to include Brandon and several other panelists. When by 10 minutes past start time no other panelists but Brandon had shown up, it turned into the “Ask Brandon Anything” panel. I really enjoyed this, as he was willing to impart wisdom and stories that I found enlightening. He answered several questions about his work in the Wheel of Time, but kept those answers short. The ones he spent more time answering were things like “How do you find time to write when you have children under foot?” and “How did you discover that writing was a passion for you?” and “How do you get yourself back to writing after a family tragedy sent you into a spiral of depression?” He really gave some thoughtful answers, and everything was treated seriously. He is a great speaker, and when he spoke of the class he teaches every year at a local university, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy towards his students.

Finally, as is tradition for me, I attended “A Shot Rang Out…” with my partner. This panel is an exercise in collaborative story-telling with a twist. During the earlier three days of the convention, there was a box at the info desk for people in the know to deposit suggested phrases or sentences. The story must start with the phrase, “A shot rang out…” and then each participant (there were five this year, including Dani and Eytan Kollin, BayCon’s toastmasters this year) must continue the story told by the previous segments and end with the phrase or sentence they pulled at random from the box. As you might imagine, this forces the story to take very unusual twists and turns as the panelists must attempt to take a crazy, semi-coherent story so far and turn it so they can end their segment with a phrase like “For he is the Cumquat Häagen-Dazs!” This can be a very hit-or-miss event, and last year’s wasn’t so good. This year, though, I thought they did a great job, including elements such as Mr. and Mrs. Cthulhu (they’re Time Lords, don’tcha know?), Malcom not-Reynolds, portal guns, and guardian idiots.

After that we attempted to pre-reg for next year, but found the registration desk closed down. Le sigh. I managed to pre-reg on the web site after we got home, so  here’s hoping for a 2013 that was as good as 2012!

In Conclusion…

Some realizations and insights:

• I’m too focused on writing something that will I want to be published. I need to relax a lot, get a LOT of writing done, and worry about publishing when I can consistently write good stuff at a good pace.
• I need to find all the impediments I have to a daily practice and get rid of them. The only way I’m going to get published is if I write daily, and I’m not doing that.
• As I do get to the point where I am confident in my writing and am getting ready to start trying to publish, I will need to really consider what self-promotion I will be comfortable doing, and what I will need help with. That’s daunting, but planning now makes little sense. By the time I’ll need it, the entire ecosystem will have changed at least once, if not multiple times.
• The upheaval of the publishing industry was a significant theme throughout the convention, and I found it interesting how the various puzzle pieces are fitting together.
• I don’t go to cons for the same reasons that most of the other people there go to cons. I go for the panels and the chance to get wisdom from established and successful authors, and maybe to talk with other aspiring authors. Most other people go to conventions for the social aspects. SMOFs see panels and guests as a necessary framework and a tool to bring new people to the convention, but not the primary focus. I think I’m doing the right thing for me, but I realize I’m the minority audience and SMOFs are not planning conventions with people like me in mind.
• There are a LOT of professionals blogging about writing out there. I found a bunch of new blogs to follow. If I’m not careful, I’ll spend all of my time reading other people’s blogs and not getting any of my writing done!

Developing Character

Tarot card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, also known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A few years ago at Baycon, I picked up a writer’s tool called “The Writer’s Tarot”. (They have since been renamed “Story Forge Cards” and after a VERY successful Kickstarter project, will be available to the public sometime this Summer.) It’s not really a tarot deck, but it uses the traditional meanings of many of the cards of the tarot to help inspire story or character development. I’m in the midst of developing some characters for a murder mystery I want to try and write, so on a whim I picked up a deck and did a “spread” that is meant to create a character’s background. I got a very interesting result.

1. The character’s Mother: Black Sheep (inverse), well thought of person suddenly becomes a black sheep and must come to terms.
2. The character’s Father: Profane, pure evil, a blight on man, god, and the universe, nothing but pain, loss and damnation.
3. The strength of their relationship: Desire.
4. The problems between them: The Moon, order prevails, even when things go poorly they behave as expected.
5. The circumstance of the character’s birth: The Angle (inverse), the universe itself becomes the opponent, rising up to prevent the goal from being reached
6. Complications if any: Epiphany (inverse), No matter how dramatically it is revealed, the truth is refused, obscured by cowardice or delusion.
7. The universe’s influence on his or her nature: Vice, even knowing it to be wrong, this person gives in to their baser nature, selfishly pursuing only the most prurient interests.
8. Early strengths: The Assassin, whether driven by vendetta or ideology, this hunter will stop at nothing until blood has been spilled.
9. Early weaknesses: The World (Inverse), no-one can get a break; the world or its people seem to be determined to provide nothing but resistance.
10. Education: Cruelty, Someone deliberately causes physical or mental suffering; can represent an act of cruelty, the effect of such abuse, or a person with a sadistic nature
11. Belief foundation: Health, the body is strong and free from disease, can be a generally good constitution or a return to health after having been injured or sick.
12. Life experience: The Secret, the consequences of the secret being revealed would be catastrophic; it must be kept at all costs.
13. A shaping experience in recent times: Knowledge, information, the wisdom to apply it well, and the power that comes with it.
14. An experience that left scars:Queen of Mirrors (inverse), The secret admirer keeps to the shadows, either too shy to publicly admit their adoration or because the attention may be unwelcome or inappropriate.
15. The state of the character at the beginning (well, at the time of death): Time is of the utmost importance, whether it is the ticking of a bomb, the passage of hours, years, centuries, or millennia.

(Note that the text of the cards I copied here is copyright B.J. West, and I’m being an evil sneak reproducing them here. No harm is intended towards Mr. West. Go out and buy a copy of the deck when they are published!)

I had originally intended the victim to be a relatively innocent person who was killed for malicious purposes. After this “spread” I’m having fun re-imagining him as the supposed son of a mob boss, who is brought up through the school of hard knocks. Recently, however, he discovered his mother had a secret lover, and that the mob boss is not really his father. I’m not yet sure how to work a secret admirer in (maybe someone who knows the truth and was sending him secret messages?), but the time thing is a surprisingly apt thing given the gimmick I want to use to frame the story.

This spread went way dark, and may wind up totally turning the character around. I kind of like it. It’s fun to let randomness be part of the creative process!

All for fun and games, but a useful creative tool. I’ll have to give this a go with the detective character.

Partnership

Image via Wikipedia

An interesting thing happened last evening after I wrote my earlier entry. I was talking with my partner, Michael, about how I felt I wasn’t going anywhere, how I felt adrift, and he challenged me to describe how I was stuck. I started relating the problems I was having with my space opera story, pointing out how I wasn’t finding ways to overcome some of the structural challenges I had gotten into with my outline to date. Right off the cuff, he had a some surprising and wonderful suggestions, most of which wouldn’t work, but some of which had interesting things going for them. The next twenty minutes went by in a flash of suggestions and counter-suggestions, ideas and idea amplification, a back and forth of revitalizing creative energy.

There seems to be a certain fit to the way we create together, to the give and take of our discussions about stories. We’ve both talked about how we each want to be published, but both of us have admitted to our own difficulties in getting there. But last night came the thought that maybe we could collaborate, we could write a story together. This is an exciting thought.

As a side effect of last night, my creative plug is. Ideas are spilling out of my head faster than I can contain and transcribe them. I might have a full outline of this piece put together in a few days, or a couple of weeks. I might even have a name for my main character, a detail that has been successfully escaping me like the Road Runner from Wile E. Coyote.

This. Is. Awesome.

Adrift

Um, hi, blog. Long time no see. Oh, no, no, it’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been a slacker. But with NaNoWriMo time upon us, I’m thinking about you again. I’m not doing NaNo this year (I think I’m kind of past that kind of insanity now), but something about this time of year sends my thoughts drifting to being writerly again.

One of the things that’s been keeping me away from the keyboard lately is a complete lack of inspiration. When I was young and foolish, dreaming of a day when I would be a writer, stories seemed plentiful “What if” was always at the tip of my tongue. Once I decided to get serious, though, that fount of creativity has dried up.

I have a few projects in the back of my mind. But I’m not making progress on any of them. Two of them are intentionally derivative, and one is in a well known and highly trademarked universe. Working on those is interesting, but ultimately non-productive. Two other projects are hovering in the back of my mind, one high fantasy, the other space opera, yet when I sit down to outline either of them (a process I find vital to my own writing practice), I get bogged down in plot problems that seem insoluble.

There are always writing exercises I could do, and that would get me writing, but those likewise feel unproductive. They’re just random prompts that might inspire a few hundred to a couple thousand words, but it’s just practice, nothing that’s going to lead to being published.

I suspect that what has happened is that my inner editor is subconsciously editing out the formerly freely flowing fount of ideas based on whether it thinks I could make a real, publishable story out of them. He’s an evil bastard, my inner editor. You’d think with all of the NaNoWriMo wins under my belt, I would be a master of sending him packing, but I don’t think I am.

I will one day find a way to be a fount of ideas again. Probably about the time I finally give up the dream of ever becoming a published writer…

Bad Boy

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been bad. I haven’t done any writing-related things in over a week. I had a story all outlined with just a couple of things yet to figure out, and had intended to write a first draft over the Independence Day holiday. But between procrastination and a dog who did not do well with the neighborhood fireworks, I never managed to get that draft written. I don’t think I’ll have time this week either; I’ll be profoundly busy. Things look better this weekend, though. If I really push myself, I should be able to complete the first and second drafts of the story before the end of the month.

Perhaps I need a reward for completing the draft? What should it be? A new Lamy? Hm.

A Reason to Protest

I Support Love

I have participated in a protest. It was a couple of years ago, when the California Supreme Court was considering whether to overturn the recently enacted Proposition 8, the initiative that stripped away marriage rights from gay, lesbian, and bi people of the state. I was outraged by the arguments being made, arguments that belittled the love of gay couples, that said that people were just fine with keeping gay people as second class citizens. And when the judgement came down that indeed the people had a right to not only vote on the civil rights of minorities, but to also strip away rights that that same court had recognized, well, I had to do something.

I'm not a protesting kind of guy. If I see something wrong, I do what I can to fix it from within the system. But sometimes the system lets you down, and I felt that in this case, the system had certainly let my partner and me down, had betrayed us. So when I heard about a protest being planned by "Join the Impact" for San Jose, I knew I had to be there.

My partner and I gathered in front of the Metropolitan Community Church in San Jose with a couple dozen other like-minded people. When the time came, we all started marching to city hall, chanting time tested slogans (some of which were a bit of a stretch, to be honest) and making a lot of noise. We got a lot of support from people driving by in the form of horn honks and cheers.

As we approached city hall, we merged with three other streams of protesters until the crowd was well over a thousand people. It was a joy to roam around the crowd reading the signs and t-shirts, and seeing the amazing variety and diversity of the people gathered there. The speeches were, well, public speeches. The PA system was inadequate for the task. And the couple of people there heckling the protest were annoying. I eventually got bored (as I do with many public gatherings), and just roamed around taking pictures.

All in all it was an interesting experience. I don't think I'd rush to participate again, but who knows. Perhaps something will happen that will cause me to be similarly outraged, moved enough to get past my feelings of ridiculousness, and join the crowd.

Outlining

I outline my writing. There, I said it. I know, it’s a dirty secret, but sometimes you just gotta come clean.

There are a lot of writers who never outline, who would rather be forced to watch educational TV programs for babies for hours on end. Me, I tried the outline-free way of writing, and it really didn’t work for me.

I like to know where I’m going. I like to know how I’m going to get there. And I like to know the steps I’ll be taking along the way.

This doesn’t mean I feel straitjacketed by my outlines. They are merely road maps, and I’m always open to taking a different road if one comes along that is more interesting than the one I had planned. When that happens, I cheerily throw the outline away and pull out a fresh piece of paper (or open a new file in my writing software).

But an outline forces me to think about the work as a whole, from the prelude to the closing curtain. It makes me look at the problems in my idea and find solutions for them. They may not be the final solution, as my subconscious brain often comes up with something better as I’m working on the details of the prose in the first part of the work, but having any solution at all is better than simply winging it. And the outline gives me an idea of how long the piece is going to wind up being. If the outline takes up the better part of a page, I know it’s going to be a good-sized short story. If it takes up the better part of a notebook, I’d better be thinking “trilogy” or more.

That said, the outline for the short story I’m currently working on is five medium-sized paragraphs written long-hand on a single sheet of paper, one paragraph for each of the “acts” of the story. There is still a major part of the story I haven’t figured out yet, so that part of the outline is somewhat sparse. My goal tonight is to figure out what to put into that hole in my outline so I can really start writing it this weekend.

Good Night

I had a good night writing last night. As I responded to a writing prompt, a workable short story came together in my mind. I got most of the first act written before bedtime, and at some point this morning I want to outline the rest. If I can complete it this weekend (possible with the three-day weekend) I’ll be ahead of my goal.

I cannot express my joy at having a workable short story idea come to me so easily. It’s always been such a struggle. It would be great if I could figure out what made it possible this time so I can make future attempts as successful.

Excuses

So, after that great entry 3 days ago about daily writing practice, how’s it going?

Well, you see, I’ve been busy…

Yep, that’s a cop-out. It’s not to say I haven’t actually been busy, mind you. The last couple of days I’ve been more focused on my bi-weekly RPG game (is that redundant, like ATM machine?), making some big decisions, and trying to mitigate the second-worst case of GM burnout I’ve ever faced. But I’m not sure I’m being honest with myself when I make the excuse. Am I too busy to work on my writing? Or have I been allowing it to be lower priority than my RPG game, my online games, the dog, surfing the web, reading, and so on and so forth?

I know I will have times where I’m just not as “with it” as other days. And I need to be okay with that. I’m trying. But now, I should get back to writing.

What I’m Doing

There are so many ways to approach the quest to become a published author. I’ve received all manner of conflicting advice, both from other writers I know and from books on writing from various well-known writers. In the end, it all seems to boil down to “do what works best for you.”

I don’t know how useful that advice is to someone who doesn’t yet know what works.

I’d like to think that I’m a very pragmatic person. I want to do what is going to be the most effective thing to move me forward in my quest. At this stage of the game, though, without knowing much about what will work, I’m in an experimental phase.

The writers’ group I used to belong to in San Diego, the Penny Dreadfuls, helped me to understand something about myself and my writing to date. I learned that I tend to think in grand plots, story within story, projects that just won’t fit into the space of a short story. Since then, I’ve made various attempts at starting a novel, making progress, and I keep running into roadblocks. I often just can’t get the plot to hang together well, or my characters just won’t gel in my mind. Sometimes, even when I have a fully formed concept of a character, I just can’t find a name that fits. (I believe that the name is an important aspect of a character, and don’t take naming them lightly.)

I’m not taking well to being continually frustrated by this. So, I’ve decided to switch gears. I’m going to try to make progress on the short story form. I know, I know, I said I don’t think in short story scope, but I think I need practice in getting an entire story told, soup to nuts, before I’m move back to writing novels. It’s not a bad plan; many other authors have followed a similar path to publishing, writing stories for various magazines and anthologies before breaking into novel-length work.

So, I’m spending the rest of June and all of July working on short stories with the goal of having written one in rough draft form by the end of July. My goal is to write something that I will eventually submit to magazines. To do that, I’m working on writing practice (nearly daily) using either my own prompts or ones I find in the most excellent book, “A Writer’s Book of Days” by Judy Reeves. I’m also reading stories from the kinds of magazines I hope to submit works to, in the hopes of understanding the kinds of stories the editors are likely to buy. (I did say I was pragmatic.)

I’m working on brainstorming into a notebook, writing longhand with some beautiful fountain pens (for some reason, the act of writing longhand, while less efficient, gives me greater freedom to be creative), capturing ideas that might make good short stories. Some time in the next week or so, I’ll pick the one that looks most likely to lead to a complete work and start writing.

If I do finish the work by the end of July, and I’m extremely lucky, I’ll be able to persuade some of the people in my old writers’ group to critique it for me. That would be super-awesome.