Editing like a boss with Tex Thompson: ArmadilloCon 2018 panel

This was another of the wonderful panels / mini-workshops on various aspects of writing -- this time, on editing your own work -- by Arianne "Tex" Thompson. Like everything by Tex Thompson, her advice on editing was broken down into bullet points and sub-bullet points, each of which contained examples of how to accomplish it.

Five hot tips for content and developmental editing

1. Eliminate happy coincidences. The coincidences that make the protagonist's life harder are mostly OK. Turn "but fortunately" into "oh, shit".

Example: if you have characters who are willing to help the protagonist, turn them into characters that are not really able to help. Or into character that are able to help, but not willing. Why should I help you? You should earn it. Or characters that are able and willing to help, but their help comes with strings attached.

2. Blow up the boring parts. You are bored reading them, but you don't know how your story should get from part A to part B.

Here are some examples how to make boring parts more exciting.

Instead of having a breakup conversation in a private place like home, or a Starbucks or a restaurant, have it in an unusual setting: in the middle of a traffic jam in a car, when no one could escape, on a whaling ship, or at an 8-year-old's birthday party at a roller rink. Can we do it at a paintball match? This can help you to spice it up and put some interesting twist on it. The world is dropping from under our feet, but we still have to do the hokey pokey, since it's an 8-year-old's birthday party. Or at the roller rink somebody falls and breaks their leg.

Arianne 'Tex' Thompson 'Editing like a Boss' panel

In a novel "Matterhorn" (by Karl Marlantes? There are other novels by that title, but I assume that's the one Tex meant -- E.), there is a long infodump when a character goes around a military camp and is introduced to lots of people and is told their military ranks and names. That would be boring, but at the same time there is a medical drama brewing, where somebody has to be medevacuated, but helicopters can't land because of high winds. So there is a ticking clock. The infodumpy introductions are alternated with the medical drama.

A race against time can definitely spice up the boring parts.

Another way to introduce suspense is to let your readers know that something dangerous or terrible is about to befall the characters, but the characters don't know it. For example, the audience knows there is a monster under a child's bed, but the kid doesn't know it. So any time when the kid rolls over and his arm drops off the bed, the audience winces.

3. Target accidental repetitions

Make them deliberate or delete them! A word or phrase repeated twice looks like accidental echo, but repeated three times sounds like you know what you are doing.

This applies not just to word usage, but to plot elements as well. For example: if the characters in your book take a road trip and are staying in motels, make the motels shabbier and shabbier as the characters run out of money. So when they are pulling up to the next motel, the reader will be cringing: what kind of bad things will be lurking at this place?

4. Sharpen relevant contrasts

Conflict is not enough, says Tex Thompson. Contrast is everything.

5. Multitask relentlessly

A great page should do at least two out of three: advance the story, develop the backstory or the setting, and build or reveal character.

Other tips

Line editing

Tex Thompson also gave tips on line editing, though I can't put them into nifty numbered-bullet-point format, because I didn't write all of them down. But here are some:

• Before every editing pass, change the format of the manuscript, such as the font or font size. The words line up differently. That way you'll see it more like a new reader. You'll see more what's actually there, not what you think is there. Have Stephen Hawking's robotic voice read it out to you. If your book sounds good while read in robotic monotone, it's good.
• Read it backwards (a basic rule of proofreading). Microsoft Office has a read-it-backward option.
• Delete distancing words: thought, said, saw, heard, felt, realized, wondered. They emphasize the distance between the character and the reader. We want the opposite -- immersion. Too much of that distance and you feel like you are watching someone playing a video game. You can google "filter words fiction" or "distancing words fiction" to find out which words you should consider deleting.
• Tex Thompson mentioned some software that can help with various aspects of writing, and the audience threw in their own suggestions. For example, Prowriting Aid is a good program that shows you how many times you've used various words. Hemingway can tell you when your sentences are too complicated. Also it's a good idea to get a readability score for your text, and the grade level. In the early chapters, while the reader doesn't yet care about the story, it's good to keep it lower grade.
• Do at least one "fast pass". Read the whole thing in a day, the way a reader who binges on your work would read it. That's the best way to find overused words / phrases. Also, you will catch inconsistencies.

Tex Thompson also gave tips for gathering and interpreting feedback.

• Try giving beta readers single chapters first. Don't give them the whole novel, because they most likely will get scared off, because they were not preprared to read this much material.
• Look for points of convergence. What comments do you keep getting? Are there common themes among them? Also remember this: people who notice a problem in your writing are usually right. People who suggest a solution are usually wrong.

• Strive to have a mix of both readers AND writers among your beta readers. Each kind will be valuable in their own way. People who are just readers but not writers haven't internalized the rules of writers, they haven't chopped up the Hero's Journey and snorted if off of a mirror. They care more about the story. Does it hold their attention?

  Also ask readers-that-are-not-writers: what other books that you've read would you compare it to? Hopefully they won't say, it's like War and Peace: I didn't finish it.

  It is important to write at least as well as Dan Brown. If you pass the Dan Brown test, you're good. This is a guy who writes "he picked up the phone with one of his two hands", but his stories get people hooked.

Writing dialogue: an ArmadilloCon 2018 panel

Authors Arianne "Tex" Thompson and Mark London Williams gave a panel on writing good dialogue. Here is some of their advice.

Mark London Williams. In emotional situations, the characters will often be indirect.

Tex Thompson agrees. When a horse approaches an object, it does not go straight to it, does not make a beeline. That's a predator move. A horse comes up at an angle to get a better view at an object. Similarly, good dialogue does not say something directly. It makes several approaches, several passes. It suggests (for smart readers to get), and then confirms, so that everyone could get on the wagon.

Specific dialog problems

Tex Thompson addresses the audience. How many of you had in your own writing struggled with a scene where you had a dialogue bouncing back and forth for pages ans pages, but not getting to the point?

She then asks Mark London Williams: What advice would you have to overcome this?

Mark London Williams. Start a scene as late as possible. Start with at teacup already smashed on the floor, and a woman says to a man: "I can't believe you did it! You always do this!" -- now the readers are forced to wonder: he did what? What does he always do? Smashes teacups? Hurts her feelings?

Tex Thompson gives another example. Let's say the dialogue starts with a line: "So the school called again today". Now the readers want to read further, because they have a sense that someone is in trouble, and they are wondering who did what.

Tex Thompson. Instead of "he said, she said", put in a sentence describing action.

"You always do this." She picked up a broken piece.

There is a rule: one paragraph for one actor.

"You always do this." Her face was calm, but under the table she was picking at her 500 hundred dollar French manicure.

Dialects

The discussion also covered dialects, accents, slang and vernacular. One of the general advices on that topic is: avoid writing out a dialect or an accent phonetically as it sounds (like "ze" instead of "the" in a stereotypical French character's speech), because that quickly becomes grating and annoying. In small amounts it can be OK, just don't write entire paragraphs like that. I don't remember most of other advice, but I remember these interesting observations:

Where more than one language is spoken, the lower-prestige language contributes the grammar, while the higher-prestige language, the vocabulary. This happened, for example, to English language after the Norman conquest of England, when French became the language of the court, while English remained the language of the peasantry.

Similarly, the names for raw foods come from the native / lower-prestige language (cow, pig), whereas the names for cooked food come from the higher-prestige language (beef, dessert).

Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016

Subtitled "Escape From Clichea", Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop was the most remarkable event at the ArmadilloCon 2016, and was alone worth the price of admission. She gave a heap of good, practical, doable recommendations on how to improve your worldbuilding, storytelling, and characters. At a typical writing workshop you'll get vague advice like "show, don't tell", and "kill your darlings", but rarely will you hear specific recommendations what to do. But Tex Thompson's workshop was an avalanche of such implementable nuggets of goodness. She showed us how to look at your story material differently and tease the interrestingness out of it.

To be sure, this wasn't the kind of workshop where professional writers and editors critique your manuscript. This was 1.5 hours of Tex Thompson speaking. But I came out of it full of ideas of how to make my stories better.

I wrote them down to the extent I remembered them.

The workshop wasn't strictly just about worldbuilding, but also covered deeper aspects of writing, like how to find your identity as a writer, how to find what makes you unique, and use it to build your online presence.

On how to build your identity as a writer

Write down 3 things you have been paid to do. Then 3 things you could write an article about. If the things on those lists have nothing to do with writing, that's completely fine. Those are things that make you unique. They help you stand out between other writers. If nothing else, they could give you ideas for your blog posts, and a blog is a big part of how a writer attracts and keeps an audience.

Here is another way to mine ideas for blog posts.

Write a list of 3 stories that you want your work to be compared to. Then write down common elements between them. For example, Tex Thompson said that for her, those elements are: (1) ensemble cast / team effort; (2) people with different abilities or powers; (3) big, wild, slightly-ruined world. Such elements are great for mining ideas for your blog or convention panel topics. For example, combining (1) and (2) could lead to Top 10 teams in comics.

Other lists to tease out your identity

Things you would you do with your life if you won a million dollars

What you tend to get into arguments about

Worldbuilding exercises

Association exercise. What do the words "four kingdoms" remind you of, asks Tex Thompson.

Audience says: 4 elements, 4 directions, 4 seasons.

Tex Thompson. Take your first idea and place it carefully in the garbage. Because it is also many people's first idea.

What could be a fresher take on the "four kingdoms" idea? The audience replied:

• Aliens come and the kingdoms have to unite to defeat them;
• Economics arms race;
• Each of the 4 lands has a princess and they are all supposed to be in a beauty pageant, but one of them has a prince and he wants to compete too.

Best practices for writers

"Arianne 'Tex' Thompson leads the Escape from Clichea worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are in my photo gallery.

• Use the Triforce!

Triforce consists of: Education - something you know about; Passion - something you care about; Inspiration - something you are excited about. At the intersection of those things is a story that only you can write, says "Tex" Thompson.

• Ask yourself: "what is the easiest, laziest thing I could do here?" Then do something else.
• Start with Episode IV, and leave space for more stories as you go.

What happened in Harry Potter world before the HP started? All the Voldemort stuff, the Marauders. Your idea for the front story might make an awesome back story.

• Question your assumptions.

Have you read a story about space travel that's set in the 25th century, but all the gender norms are from the 20th century? Or they have all the same notions of nuclear family and property?

Everything that surprises you about another country / culture says something about your own. There is a book series CultureShock! that explains how to live in another country. In US it says, don't drop off at someone's house uninvited. It's OK to ask what people do, but not how old they are. You can call uninvited, but not after 9 pm. Never cut in line, that will not be good to you.

• Give us something we expect and something we don't.

Many enormously successful TV and book series do that. Star Trek: a Western but in space. Game of Thrones: medieval fantasy, but gritty / realistic. Harry Potter: witches / wizards, but in high school. Another example. Chuck Wendig once asked: what would a vampire do in a zombie apocalypse? In "Double Dead", the vampire tries to make sure that the human race does not go extinct, because then he'll be out of food. So he herds human survivors through the apocalypse.

In any scenario, ask:

• Who benefits from the current state of affairs? Who tends to benefit in most zombie apocalypse stories? Zombies, warlords, gritty surrivors. Even in the worst of times somebody turns a profit. Doomsday preparers, escaping prisoners, drug companies? Gun manufacturer Colt?
• Who loses out? Who is the first to go? The slow and the sick. The people on the front lines where the apocalypse started -- hospital workers who got blood sprayed on them. They are gone.
• Who's trying to maintain the status quo? Usually people who are winning, or people who think they are getting a better deal than they would otherwise. How many of you stayed in a crappy job because its certainty was better than the uncertainty of the alternative?
• Who is trying to change things? Someone who is losing, who has nothing left to lose.

Explore the timeline

While my memory of the workshop is already vague, I think this was a segue of the "vampires protect people from zombies" exercise. I assume this all means not that we, writers, need to explore all these time periods in our prose, it's just that perhaps the story could be built around not the event itself, but what happened n number of years later.

• 3 months later: chaos, social collapse, ragtag survivors
• 10 years later: status quo; the world is relatively stable. But what are we doing now that we weren't doing 3 months after the event? Maybe we are enslaving zombies. We have started to adapt to this new world.
• 50 years later: the idea that there was something before this seems strange. You still have people who remember the old world, Kennedy's assasination, the days when presidents used to drive down the street in open convertibles. But also the current generation may not know or appreciate reasons for the current state of affairs. This leads to a possibility of a new conflict. They have no respoect for their vampires-elders. They don't understand why people submit to the vampire lords.
• 100 years later: nobody remembers the way it was. Nobody alive today remembers the flu pandemic of 1918. From the 50s to the 90s our big preoccupation was the cold war and the Bomb. Now everybody has a bomb. We don't worry about Russians launching nukes so much. We are worried about people sitting next to us in a movie theatter. The Great War doesn't come up so much as it does in the fantasy novel prologues.

How much info to dump?

When Tex Thompson teaches at the DFW writers workshop, she tells writers: don't pack me a lunch, leave me breadcrumbs. If your mom packs you a lunch, you'll throw away the apple, trade the cookies, etc. You are more like T-Rex: you don't want to be fed, you want to hunt.

Give readers just enough information about your world to build something of their own

Consider how many bigger-than-big franchises -- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel Universe, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Pokemon -- give you enough information so that you can create your own Jedi, superhero, wizard school, etc. And they make the world vast and intriguing enough that you would WANT to! Ask yourself: what am I giving my readers to do while they wait for my next book? Fan theories about what is Jon Snow's real heritage, Rey's from Star Wars real heritage, etc. Can they make a costume of a character? In how many ways can they participate in this world? In what ways can you make it exciting to participate?

Tex Thompson enjoyed Harry Potter, but like many fantasy novels, the main character was a dude. She wanted to make her own hero. For example, in the world of Sugar Rush racers, who are all named after candy, Tex's friend made his own Sugar Rush racer, Molten Milk Toast. Does your world accommodate other heroes? Do you establish your world well enough for your fans to actively participate in it? And is it interesting enough that they would want to? If your wizard school is in UK, would the readers wonder what it would be like in the Caribbean?

A guy in the audience. Leave the rules a little open, that the people would wonder how much is possible.

Tex. Right. We need some rules at the outset, but we don't need them all right away. And a lot of the secret sauce is what is the right order of revelations so that they would let people build upon one another, etc.

"Use the Triforce, Luke! Triforce consists of Passion, Education, or Inspiration -- in other words, something you care about, something you know about, and something you are excited about. At the intersection of these three lies a story only you can write. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are in my photo gallery.

Problem: infodumps are boring

Solution: do not let your story answer any questions the reader hasn't had time to ask!

Give out world details and exposition like treats. Instead of infodumping an explanation of how the star drive work, ask yourself, what question is that an answer to? The question probably comes up when the star drive is broken and needs to be fixed. "We need a new flux capacitor, or else the discombobulator won't work."

What excuse do they make for explaining magic in Avatar the Last Airbender? "Why is so-and-so special? Why can he control all 4 elements?"

Anything you are tempted to go on and one for 100 pages about, make it the focal point of your story. Make your story about how to survive on Mars, and hundreds of pages on growing potatoes will become relevant.

Problem: making a fictional world as detailed as the real wone would take forever, and also be super boring. What should you do?

Answer from the audience. Use the same cliches as in the real world?

Tex. Yes. Use the words "magic wand". Readers already know how it works. Or "hyperdrive". Everybody knows what it is.

You don't want to include things that are not relevant, things that have no emotion attached to it. But if I tell you what magic the blue crystal does, what will you automatically wonder about? What other crystals are there, and what magic they do.

Solution: imply that your world contains more detail than is explicitly given in the book.

Conservation of detail: if something is explained in depth, it's because it's somehow important to the story. (The Malazan series by Steven Erikson stomp on this idea. He explains everything about everything.) Respect your readers' brain cells. If I ask the reader to spend a brain cell, there should be a reward for it.

Using the real world responsibly

How to avoid stereotypes

In real life we have stereotypes about entire nations, about some states or even some cities. In fantasy it is easy to fall into the same pattern. Elves have stereotypes about orcs and vice versa. Their races do not get along. But in reality, within any nation, people are quite different from one another. There is enough internal variation between elves and between orcs. In real world, your biggest beef is usually not with the person across the ocean, but with a person across the street. Your fantasy world will be more detailed if you tell us what elves fight among themselves about. Is it what type of wood is best for bow crafting? Is it something as silly as what end of an egg to open from breakfast?

What kinds of people tend to get left out this kind of story? Can you find a way to include them?

Going back to the vampires-in-a-zombie-apocalypse example, what kind of people don't make it through a zombie apocalypse? The elderly and the sick. One of Tex's friend had said: "Why would I want to read stories about apocalypse? If power goes out, my fridge goes out, I won't get my insulin and I'll die. So why would I want to read it?"

One of the plot threads in your book could be about how a guy with diabetes makes it through the apocalypse. Will the vampire take care of him personally? Will he the vampire hunt pigs to make insulin?

Make a story that includes a category of people who are not commonly included, and you might have a whole new big group of fandom for yourself.

Smash the Monoliths!

Question. What is the easiest, laziest, most obvious, least-realistic thing I could do with my fictional people?

Answer. Create a monoculture.

You are probably wondering: but what if I mess up? What if I write a character outside of my own experience and get it wrong? Don't worry, says Tex: you WILL mess up. No matter what you write, someone will hate it. There is a famous quote: "If you're not pissing someone off, you probably aren't doing anything important." Use your fear of hurting people (from other cultures or marginalized groups) to motivate you to do your research. Listen to people, and solicit feedback -- even painful feedback.

---

The following year I had the fortune to attend another of Tex Thompson's workshops, "Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue". It took place in Austin in July 2017, and focused on dialogue. Your characters are constantly in motion: they clash, collide, fold, buckle, shift. Good dialogue expresses all that. Here are some of the slides from the dialogue workshop

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ArmadilloCon 2012: a summary

Misunderstandings about writers was the topic of the toastmaster's speech at the opening ceremony. Even in these days of decline of published word the general public continues to perceive writers' lives as glamorous. Since the toastmaster shared a personal anecdote, I will refer to him only as T (to keep Google's prying eyes away). One time he told a stranger he played XBox with that he was a writer. The stranger immediately found this suspicious, and started asking T his name, address, and what books he has published. T answered his questions, all the while surprised that his XBox pal didn't think T could just have borrowed someone else's name and biographical facts. And though the XBox pal had never heard of this writer, he said: "Wow! I've never played XBox with anyone famous!" T replied: "You still haven't".

First row: Jeremy Lassen, Martin Wagner (speaking); second row: Liz Gorinsky, Robert Jackson Bennett, Joe McKinney; third row: Mark Finn, Matthew Bey, Nicole Duson -- teachers at the writers' workshop. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Writers' workshop. There are many ways to express how a writers' critique group can help you, and many of them involve self-deprecatory humor, which is apropos in anticipation of your "brilliant" story being trounced. For example, they might tell you when there's a toilet in your kitchen -- metaphorically speaking.

The writing game required us to smell, taste, and touch various items while blindfolded, and list 5 positive and 5 negative adjectives about each smell, taste, or texture. It was a mostly futile occupation for someone like me with only a rudimentary sense of smell or taste.

Nancy Jane Moore, Kevin Jewell, Marshall Maresca, Jessica Reisman, and Madeleine Dimond on the 'Workshopping to Success' panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Workshops are multifaceted things, and the advice given in them is not always helpful, as noted in the "Workshopping To Success" panel. Sometimes a critique group that points out a toilet in your kitchen simply doesn't understand the architecture of your home. For example, it may be a group of fantasy writers all into dragons and elves, but you don't write that kind of fantasy, and they'll be bored with your work. Perhaps you shouldn't bring your work into a critique group that thinks your whole genre is one big toilet? Or perhaps you should! Show your drafts to people who don't read your genre to see if you can keep them entertained. That's what Mary Doria Russell did. She showed the first draft of "The Sparrow" to her aunts, who only read mysteries, but no science fiction. And they kept reading it.

Another thing to note is that you need a different critique group for a novel than for short stories. You need first readers who are in it for a long run. If you bring new chapters of your novel to an open-to-all critique group, you'll see new people at every meeting. Those people will read the chapter and say: "I have no idea what's going on, but let me tell you what I think".

Kenneth Mark Hoover, Bill Frank, and Bob Mahoney on the panel on writing hard science fiction. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Writing hard science fiction. Why base a story on science fact? If you do so, you disarm people who say that "it" will never happen, "it" being the subject of your speculation -- for example, a total surveillance society. How much scientific or technical detail to put in a SF story? A good rule of thumb is this: you can mention how a headset works, but don't elaborate on the wiring, unless it plays part in electrocuting your character's brain.

Another thing reading and writing hard science fiction can teach you, is to think through what-if scenarios. It's a great life skill, says Bill Frank -- both at work and in personal life. Before you start a project, you can learn to identify potential points of failure, and come up with alternative plans.

Robert Jackson Bennett, Elizabeth Moon, Chris N. Brown, and Madeleine Dimond on a "Social Impacts of New Technology" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Social Impacts of New Technology. Madeleine knows a professor who gives his students every 15 minutes a connect-break in class, when everybody is allowed to use their gadgets to check their email, etc., otherwise they'll get too anxious and distracted. Audience is shaking their heads in disbelief.

3-D printing has been on everyone's lips lately, and just a week before ArmadilloCon came an announcement that 3-D technology now makes it possible to print guns. Most people in the audience found this development chilling. Elizabeth Moon thinks that since such printing requires lots of energy, law enforcement officers might look at who is consuming lots of energy, to get clues as to who is printing guns. Robert Jackson Bennett is not sure how viable 3D printing is, given that power is going to get much more expensive in the near future. (My Twitter friends responded that you should be able to run such a printer off of solar energy.)

Chris N. Brown is hopeful about a future where technologies could be brought down to "garage level", and anyone could build surveillance drones in their garages. That way we should able to monitor what the police is doing as much as it monitors us. A woman in the audience noted that abundance of garage-level technologies might renew interest in science among American school children, 70% of which currently say science is too hard.

Ari Marmell, Bev Hale, Madeleine Dimond, and Matthew Bey on the "Story ideas I don't want to see again" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Story ideas I don't want to see again" panel quickly got bogged down in trivial stuff, as the panelists started complaining how they never wanted to see skimpily dressed women on book covers again.

-- Why can't healthy, loving relationships ever be discussed in genre fiction? Quick answer: healthy relationships are too "boring" for fiction, because most fiction is fueled by conflict. Bev Hale then said that there are some science fiction works that portray loving relationships -- for example, Lois Bujold Miles Vorkosigan series or Firefly.

-- Some of the relationships tropes that the panelists DON'T want to see again are "The fate of the whole world depends on these two people getting together, and their relationship is more important than the whole world", as well as "I'm so special that there is no mere man who is worthy to be my mate. He has to be a werewolf or vampire."

-- We also don't want to see rape universally used as "something bad that happened in the heroine's past that made her come back stronger", says Ari Marmell. Too often it's used as a lazy character-building shortcut, as if there was no other adversity that a woman protagonist could possibly experience and overcome.

-- Another trope we don't want to see: white people go to another planet and save the natives.

Al Jackson, John Gibbons, Alan Porter and Paige Roberts / Ewing on the "Is Interstellar Space Travel Possible?" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Is Interstellar Space Travel Possible?" John Gibbons pointed out that there is a perception that the problem with interstellar travel is the speed of light, but in reality getting close to the speed of light is not even a question. A fusion bomb-powered spaceship would take an amount of fuel the size of a small planet to reach even a 10th of the speed of light. There's no way to do it on a planetary energy budget. The only way to do it is to colonize the solar system first, and to gain a solar system-sized energy budget.

A common science fiction scenario, generation ship, was also discussed on the panel. Paige Roberts doesn't think a generation ship would have much chance of arriving to the destination and colonizing a distant planet, because over many generations the people in the ship might evolve or progress to the point where they don't remember where or why they are going; or don't care. Or that they wouldn't overuse their resources. It's unlikely that they'll stay the same and faithful to their purpose. Alan Porter also thinks it's implausible.

So, sad to say, we did not brainstorm new and promising ways to get out to interstellar space.

Jaime Lee Moyer, Patrice Sarath, Rhiannon Frater, Chloe Neill, Michael Bracken and Katherine Eliska Kimbriel at the "Writing Strong Female Characters" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Writing Strong Female Characters" panel was thoughtfully moderated by Patrice, who asked good questions.

-- Rhiannon Frater says: mothers in fiction are typically portrayed as weak characters, though in reality mothers defending their children can be fierce and heroic.

-- Can male writers write believable female characters? Michael Bracken says he's pretty sure he can, as he had plenty of strong women in his family.

-- Kick-ass women protagonists as lone wolves with no female friends is a damaging cliche.

We don't get many costumes (read: almost none) at ArmadilloCon, but here is Raven as Elizabeth Shaw from Prometheus. Who, one could say, IS a strong female character. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

-- What does a strong character mean anyway, even when speaking about males? Rhiannon Frater said that some guys who read her fiction said her male characters sound like normal guys one would like a barbecue with, but the men in her critique group criticized her male characters for not being a Rambo. It seems too many people think that in genre fiction a strong character has to be a cliche.

What sciences haven't been used yet in science fiction?. I didn't even take a picture of the panelists, because this panel reached an all-time intellectual low in my memory of ArmadilloCon. It happened when a certain poet (I don't know why he was on the panel, because he didn't seem to have a clue about science) said that a new "scientific" idea that still hasn't been used was a spaceship powered by "emissions" from eating Mexican food. Moderator Madeleine Dimond tried hard to keep it on track, and in fact the panel later recovered from the poet's verbal emissions. We had a brief, but interesting discussion whether cyberpunk fell in the realm of computer science, or not -- Madeleine agreed with me that it didn't, and that real computer science is one of those very underutilized sciences in SF. Another guy in the audience suggested cyberpunk takes a transhumanist approach, without being necessarily scientific.

In the style of the "Gorilla of the Gasbags" challenge, Madeleine issued her own challenge to the audience -- to write a SF story based on an underused science. She let everyone who wanted to draw a slip of paper with a science on it. I drew alien psychology. That shouldn't be too hard -- I'll just base the story on my own psychology. And the best thing, we have two years to submit our stories for the challenge, because there won't be an Armadillocon next year.

My drafts are a continuum

I don't know if I finished the first draft of my novel. At the beginning of last year I said I was going to, but I don't know. That's because I'm no longer sure what should count as a first draft. The zeroth draft was clear. I had a beginning and an ending, but the middle lacked some chunks. Now all the parts are in place, and in the right order. Finding the right order was nontrivial. Maybe normal writers write a story in a linear fashion, as it develops in time, but that's not me. I write chunks and scenes, and wrack my brain about how to make them fit together. Which one should come before another one? The story can be told in any of the million ways.

I can't help but see stories from a software engineering perspective, not something that develops in time, but as a modular structure that occupies (mental) space. The logical way the modules fit together may not necessarily be the temporal way.

I finally worked out the order in which to string the scenes together. But I also determined I need more scenes with certain characters, because they are more instrumental to the story than I thought before. So can I really say I have Draft 1, or is still Draft 0.5? Or perhaps novel drafts should not be versioned like software releases?

I also have several short (or "short") stories I am working on, all but the newest one completed, and in various states of rewriting. One of them underwent five rewrites -- five completely different variations on the same theme with the same characters, converging on the same finale -- and this is still not the end. I need to figure out how to make the final version shorter. Might I be overthinking this just a tad?

That's the state of my writing for 2011. As far as my programming goes (and I can only speak of spare time projects, not anything I do at work), I'll spare the gentle reader an account of all false starts and stops on my coding endeavors throughout the year. It suffices to say that for the last month I've been trying to get an application I wrote to work on a Windows-hosted website. It is supposed to automate certain tasks on which I spend a lot of time, so it is important to me. To make a long story short, I found out that there are certain incompatibilities between the development environment on my laptop, and my Windows website environment, that can make it impossible to host that application. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, and I don't know which is more viable. It can also be said that when it comes to web hosting, I have champagne tastes on beer budget.

ArmadilloCon 2011: What is Texas Weird, and other gems of wisdom from the writers' workshop

ArmadilloCon writers' workshop followed the familiar agenda from the years before. The unexpected, as always, happened at the time of games and critiques.

The writing game was dreamt up by Scott Lynch at 3 a.m. the night before. Surprisingly (or not), it was one of the more meaningful games compared to previous workshops. (I just can't get into "let's collectively write a story" exercises. If I'm not in a complete control of my story, I stall. This was different.) You had to come up with a 4-sentence a story, or a synopsis thereof. Then an "evil" editor would tell you to make changes to make the story more sellable. You had to make them in 10 minutes. Finally everyone was supposed to read their original story, editor's comments, and the final story out loud. Luckily for me, due to time pressure only 4 or 5 people had to share their works.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke, the "editor" (left), gives sly suggestions how to improve Allyson's and Jason's stories at the writing game. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

The editors were supposed to be intentionally evil: their feedback required the author to throw away his or her precious idea. Let's say you wrote a story where humans, having landed on an alien planet, drilled into its core and found intelligent life there. The editor would praise your hard SF concept, and tell you that the drill actually bore into hell, and it's not aliens there, but demons. Or if your plot is influenced by the physics of a rotating black hole, the editor would say that rotating black holes are so last decade, and you should make it a diamond star (which was on the news recently).

Such an exercise may seem absurd, but its point was to teach us how to write "on demand". An editor can and will ask to make changes, and you have to cooperate even if your muse doesn't. Don't wait for the muse to inspire you, but crank out a product when you're asked to, and don't treat your ideas as sacred.

Paolo Bacigalupi, Lou Anders, and Mark Finn at the critique group. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Later it was time for critiques. I was lucky to be in a group that not only was taught by great critiquers -- Guest of Honor Paolo Bacigalupi, and Mark Finn (who, by the way, has an uncanny ability to come up with plot twists to improve students' stories), but a third pro spontaneously joined our group. It was Pyr editor Lou Anders. I don't know what prompted him to join us, but he speed-read students' stories while the other group members were speaking, and gave critiques on the spot. Speed-reading (which, I presume, is all he does as an editor) made the stories look different to him than they did to other members who gave them more consideration. This was good, because it made the flaws really stand out. He didn't pick up on what other people (including the pros) identified as good parts of my story, but immediately pointed out a major flaw. It is invaluable to know how an editor sees a story.

All three pros not only pointed out what was wrong with the students' works, but gave suggestions how to improve them. That doesn't always happen. It gives me more confidence that maybe this will be the year I will revise my story based on the feedback. (No, I didn't do it the previous years. Bad writer. Bad!)

So what is Texas Weird?

A comment by Mark Finn clarified for me what "Texas Weird" genre is. Brainstorming ways to make one student's story better, he said: "Your opening sentence should be 'The President was holding a closed door meeting with severed heads.'" This would put the story in the Texas Weird genre. It pulls the curtain off the key historical moments and shows us how certain world-changing decisions were made, Mark explained. Yes, a president consulting severed heads might not even be the most unreasonable explanation for some US foreign or domestic policy decisions of recent decades.

Pictures from Armadillocon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon 2011 panels I want to see

Here are the panels I want to see at this year's ArmadilloCon (August 26-28). In square brackets are my comments on why I'm interested in that particular panel. The ones in bold are must-see for me. Well... as must-see as can be after going for a decade to a convention where pretty much all the same people are on panels year after year, and you more or less know what they are going to say. Fortunately, guests of honor can liven things up.

Friday

Fr1600SB Welcome to ArmadilloCon
Fri 4:00 PM-5:00 PM Sabine
S. Bobo, B. Denton*, J. Juday, K. Meschke, W. Spencer
Our panelists will talk about the essential elements of sf cons in general and ArmadilloCon in particular. Learn about all the can't-miss events you should attend to get the most out of our con.

[ Brad Denton usually brings barbecue, and Scott Bobo brings martinis, right? ]

or

Fr1700SB Introduction to SF/F Fandom
Fri 5:00 PM-6:00 PM Sabine
B. Crider, F. Duarte*, A. Jackson, M. Walsh, P. Wells
Learn about all the aspects of organized science fiction fandom. By the end you'll be able to use fannish jargon like filk, BNF, BEM, and more!

[ I have been in science fiction fandom for many years, but haven't participated in an organized way, my on-and-off FACT membership notwithstanding. Maybe I should hear about the wonders of organized fandom.]

Fr1900T Opening Ceremonies
Fri 7:00 PM-7:30 PM Trinity
L. Anders, P. Bacigalupi, E. Bull, F. Duarte, Ma. Finn*, J. Juday, W. Shetterly, C. Siros, V. Villafranca
This formally kicks off the con. Get introduced to the con's major guests. Afterward attend the Meet the Pros party.

Fr1930A Meet the Pros Party
Fri 7:30 PM-9:30 PM Plaza Area
Here's an opportunity to meet your favorite author or artist.

Fr2000T Building a Fictional Society from the Ground Up
Fri 8:00 PM-9:00 PM Trinity
P. Bacigalupi, E. Bear*, A. Latner, A. Marmell, J. Reisman, M. Wells
A discussion of worldbuilding in sf/f.

[ Must attend it because Paolo Bacigalupi, the writer Guest of Honor, is in it. But I've seen so many worldbuilding panels, they occupy a sizeable section of my blog, and they all blur together ].

or

Fr2000SM How Would an Alien Presence on Earth Affect Our Society?
Fri 8:00 PM-9:00 PM San Marcos
A. Jackson, K. Kimbriel, A. Martinez*, P. Jones, B. Mahoney, B. Yansky
A classic "what if" scenario discussed by a panel of writers and scientists.

[ If only Paolo Bacigalupi was in this one! But at every con there are at least two panels I want to see at the same time. This year, it's "Building a Fictional Society" and this one. ]

Saturday

Sa1000SA Stump the Panel: Make Up an SF/F Use for an Everyday Object
Sat 10:00 AM-11:00 AM San Antonio
B. Foster, M. Muenzler, J. Nevins*, J. Reisman, F. Summers
The audience supplies the items, and the panel provides the imagination.

[ Maybe? Stump the Panel has been getting less and less funny over the years, and completely fizzled out last year. ]

Sa1100SA Imagining a World without Fossil Fuels
Sat 11:00 AM-Noon San Antonio
P. Bacigalupi, M. Bey, J. Blaschke*, M. Cardin, D. Chang, K. Stauber
Discussing the implications of this all-too-plausible scenario.

[ Well, Paolo Bacigalupi will be in this one, and he has created quite an interesting post fossil-fuel world in "The Windup Girl", so it's worth seeing just for that. ]

Sa1400SA Writing a Strong Female Protagonist
Sat 2:00 PM-3:00 PM San Antonio
A. Allston, E. Bull, A. Downum, J. Kenner*, T. Mallory, M. Wells
The challenges of writing a tough-yet-relatable heroine.

[ Maybe? Very little writing advice seems new to me anymore. But having heard it all doesn't mean I know how to apply it -- that only comes with practice. So perhaps there isn't much point in going to such panels. ]

Sa1600SA What You Should Have Read in 2010-2011
Sat 4:00 PM-5:00 PM San Antonio
E. Bear, M. Muenzler, J. Nevins*, W. Siros, T. Wagner
Our annual rundown of the year's best.

[ I always go to this one, and repost the list on my blog -- in fact, this is one of the very few events when people *ask* for the URL of my blog. ]

Sa1700T Fannish Feud
Sat 5:00 PM-6:00 PM Trinity
L. Anders, P. Bacigalupi, S. Bobo, E. Bull, S. Cupp, F. Duarte, Ma. Finn*, W. Shetterly, V. Villafranca, M. Walsh, P. Wells
Come see our Fans vs. Pros game show event.

[ I have never seen a Fannish Feud -- let's make this a year when I'll finally see one. ]

Sa1900T What is the Next Big Literary Movement in Texas SF/F?
Sat 7:00 PM-8:00 PM Trinity
L. Antonelli, J. Blaschke, R. Eudaly, K. Stauber, D. Webb*, L. Thomas
In the 80s and 90s, Texas writers were intimately involved with the cyberpunk movement. Is there a current movement that's about to sweep up the new crop of Lone Star authors?

[ Maybe? I heard of most Texas SF/F authors, and have checked out the ones that sounded interesting, but perhaps I'll find a new reason to check out some of the rest?

Sa2000T Wiscon and Elizabeth Moon: What Happened and What Can We Learn from It?
Sat 8:00 PM-9:00 PM Trinity
E. Bull*, S. Leicht, S. Lynch, L. Person, C. Rambo, L. Thomas
Elizabeth Moon was invited and announced as Guest of Honor for the 2011 Wiscon, but the invitation was withdrawn following a noteworthy blog post she wrote. What were the issues, and was the situation handled appropriately? How do we avoid similar situations?

[ I didn't find Elizabeth Moon's notorious rant offensive, even though I, as an immigrant, should have been among those who were offended by it. Parts of it, though, rubbed me the wrong way. Honestly, I have long forgotten about it, but mmm... fandom drama! Must hear the juicy details! ]

Sa2200SA Is the Singularity Possible?
Sat 10:00 PM-11:00 PM San Antonio
J. Gibbons*, A. Latner, M. Maresca, A. Simmons, K. Stauber
Hard sf writers such as Vernor Vinge have long speculated that someday machine intelligence will outpace that of humans. Recently some writers including Charles Stross have suggested that this is impossible. Our panelists discuss.

[ While I doubt the panelists will cover ground that wasn't already covered by Vernor Vinge in this ArmadilloCon 2003 panel, or by an AI researcher and a president of the Singularity Institute in this SXSW 2011 panel, still... I simply can't resist anything with S-word in it! ]

Sa2300T Ghost Stories
Sat 11:00 PM-Midnight Trinity
S. Allen, S. Johnson, J. McDermott, N. Southard*, W. Spencer, D. Webb
Want to hear something really scary? Our panelists tell their favorite ghost stories.

[ This should be plain fun. ]

Sunday

Nothing really must-see until 1 p.m., and then only a couple of panels of mild-to-moderate interest to me.

Su1300SB Harry Potter Movies: A Look Back
Sun 1:00 PM-2:00 PM Sabine
R. Clement-Moore, F. Duarte*, Ma. Finn, J. Kenner
Now that the movies are over, let's discuss the series for a final time and see how it measured up to the books.

[I'm fond of Harry Potter books and movies, so why not?]

or

Su1300SM Finding Your Voice as a Storyteller
Sun 1:00 PM-2:00 PM San Marcos
N. Barrett, J. Blaschke*, S. Brust, A. Downum, W. Spencer, S. White
The most fun writers to read are those with distinctive narrative voices. How does a writer develop one?

[ Again, I've heard most writing advice, so I'm not sure it's worth it. ]

Su1400SA Writing from a Viewpoint Other than Your Own
Sun 2:00 PM-3:00 PM San Antonio
A. Allston, J. Lansdale, S. Leicht, A. Martinez*, W. Shetterly
How does a writer approach a viewpoint character of a different gender, religion, ethnicity, age, or moral code?

[ This could be very interesting if it goes beyond the obvious and the platitudes. It's just that panels about difficult things (and I think writing a viewpoint character of a different background is very difficult) often doesn't go beyond stating that it's hard and you just have to figure it out yourself. :-) ]

My NaNoWri3Years

... and just like that, I realized I am writing the final scene of my first novel. Not NaNoWriMo -- I've been working on this one for three years. I didn't expect this scene to be final, but it seems fitting to end the novel here, and leave the rest to the reader's imagination. Well, at least in Draft Zero -- it's subject to change in subsequent drafts. Yes, I said Draft Zero, because it does not deserve the title of first draft yet. That's even taking into account that, as they say, the first draft should look like it was hastily translated from Icelandic by a non-native speaker. No, my Draft Zero is nowhere near as polished as that.

It needs:

-- a few more characters. At the very least it needs me to decide what happened to some secondary characters that made brief appearances and left plot threads dangling. Those characters need to be rounded up and brought back into the plot;

-- figuring out which parts of the story need to happen before other parts; in other words, a consistent timeline;

-- a firmer grasp of physics (it's a science fiction novel);

-- a decision on whether it should have just one point of view, or if the two protagonists each need their own POV. I am leaning towards the latter, because if everything is shown from the POV of Protagonist 1, readers won't have a way to find out what happened to Protagonist 2 (except by P2 giving an infodump to P1, and we know desirable infodumps are);

-- last but not least, it needs character development. More vivid descriptions of places would be nifty too.

Oh, it also needs names for characters and places -- time to stop designating the characters as X and Y. And a title.

If I'm lucky, it will take me another year to get to Draft One, at which point I might start taking it to critique groups. But now I'm actually tempted to put this aside and write a new novel, which has been marinating inside me for months now. It started out as a short story, and grew into a novella, and then I realized that to do proper justice to those ideas, I need to make it a novel. But on an average day, I only have time to work on one or the other. There's no way I would have time for both. So I think I'll have to do revisions of this novel, and let the next one wait a year.

ArmadilloCon 2010: writers' workshop, and sandwiches that cost their weight in gold

Writers' workshop went as usual, which is to say, not bad. I workshopped the same story as in the ApolloCon workshop. I didn't have time to finish a new one, because the deadlines for the two workshops were so close. I had only 3 days to fix my story before submitting it to the ArmadilloCon workshop. The comments I got on my story at ArmadilloCon were different than the ones I got at ApolloCon. So my fixes might have worked, at least the ones that concerned point of view and character motivation. But some of the comments, addressing deep, structural flaws of the story, remained.

ArmadilloCon is in a different hotel this time than before. As before, the only two options for writers' workshop lunch were (1) buy food catered by the hotel, or (2) bring your own. Hotel-provided lunch cost... wait for it... $34.34. That's for a sandwich, cookie, and coke. No, the sandwich was not made with caviar. Naturally, many people, including me, opted to bring their own lunches.

Our previous hotel allowed people who brought sack lunches to eat in the workshop room with the rest of the group. The new hotel does not allow it. People who brought their food were told to leave the hotel, and walk far, far away from the hotel grounds to consume the food.

But here's the dilemma. The whole point of group lunch was that students get to hang out with the teachers (professional writers and editors who critique students' work), and talk about writing. This wouldn't work if those students who brought food went outside, and those with catered lunches staid inside. So, in each critique group (there were nine of them, 5-6 students each), if even one person brought sack lunch, the whole group had to go outside. Ergo, after spending $34 you still had to go out into 100-degree Texas heat and eat stuff you could buy for $5 from a sandwich shop nearby.

Fortunately, there was another option, to go into somebody's hotel room to eat. The hotel allows you to eat your own food in hotel rooms, just not in public spaces. My group went into one of our students' hotel room (she was from Houston, thus she was staying in the hotel). At least we didn't have to roast alive while eating.

But other than that, the workshop was pretty good. A big thank you goes out to its organizer, Stina Leich. She made the best out of ridiculous circumstances the hotel put us in.

Pictures from Armadillocon 2010 and writers' workshop are in my photo gallery.

Because it's been only 10 years since it first came out...

...I have finally jumped on Harry Potter bandwagon. I did not want to fight bookstore crowds, line up overnight, and read a 700-page doorstop in one sitting so as to have a chance to enjoy it before people reveal spoilers. 10 years has been long enough to forget most spoilers I've heard. But the real reason why I didn't get into Harry Potter books when they were still new was that I did not find them very engaging. I tried the first couple of chapters of book 1, and about the same amount of book 2. I got an impression that the fantasy world in Potter series was no more than skin-deep, and instead of diving in and being swallowed by the book's world, I bounced right out.

This time I started with HP2, "The Chamber of Secrets", because I couldn't find HP1 in the library. (Did you think I was going to pay for it? J. K. Rowling is richer than God already.) Yes, the first few chapters still felt superficial. I'll second what was said by a New York Times or Washington Post book critic: magic in the Harry Potter world has a very specialized, domestic character. For example, there is a clock that shows what time each family member had to be home, or a teleportation method called Floo, that lets you travel through chimneys. It's like magic was shoehorned to fit domestic life.

As I got past the first few chapters, the book drew me in -- not because the Harry Potter world acquired a previously unseen depth, but because the events in it galloped at such a crazy pace. The kids were shunted from adventure to adventure without break. And while a fast-paced plot is generally a good thing, in the Chamber of Secrets the plot left no room for observation, reflection, or world-building. Nobody ever paused to think what the events mean not just in terms of predicting the enemy's next step, but also about the laws of the (magical) world that surrounded them. In the best SF or fantasy books events are just clues that point towards bigger, unseen things; by pausing to reflect, characters attain a glimpse of a deeper order of the world. I saw nothing like that in the "Chamber of Secrets". There was no strangeness there. All the "magic" fit so neatly with the mundance understanding of the world, that there was not a moment where I went, "this is odd, I don't understand this". In other words, the good ole sense of wonder was missing from the Harry Potter world.

It was also a bit disappointing that at crucial moments, such as Harry's fight with Tom Riddle, some magic artifacts appeared in the right time and the right place arbitrarily, with only a flimsy explanation.

One might say that oddness and strangeness is neither appropriate nor necessary in a children's book; but I disagree. (As an aside, I've wondered if any book with a teenage protagonist is automatically a Young Adult book. Probably not. Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials", with its 11-12 year old protagonists, is definitely not a book for 11-12-year-olds, because of the complexity of its subject matter.)

Eventually though, the "Chamber of Secrets" drew me in, and so did the third book, "Prisoner of Azkaban", which seemed better written and more engaging. The pieces fit together better. Here we finally get glimpses that the wizarding world has a fascinating history, steeped in adult drama. It's still not high-concept worldbuilding that I like in speculative fiction, but it's something.

ArmadilloCon: what's more alien than aliens?

You've built your world (see previous post), and someone needs to inhabit it. It may as well be aliens. So there was a panel on creating believable aliens. This topic, like others, gets recycled every few years. There was a better panel on this topic in ArmadilloCon 2003, or maybe it only seemed better because I had not yet heard the usual advice on creation of believable aliens. The "usual" advice is discussed in detail in this article on my web site.

"Believable aliens" means they should not talk and act like Midwestern 20th century Americans, yet they shouldn't be too alien, because the reader won't understand them at all. It's better if their societal model is based on some human cultural situation, or animal behavior -- and Taylor Anderson, who has a Master's degree in history says that pretty much any societal model you can dream up, such as a matriarchal cannibalist society, has a precedent in human history. Extremely alien aliens might work in a very short story, since the reader may be able to read it without getting too confused or losing interest. "The Dance of the Changer And The Three" by Terry Karr was given as an example of such a story.

Speaking of human models for alien societies, Chris Roberson suggests we look no further than the Japanese society. He thinks there are more differences between Japanese culture and ours, than there are between any science-fictional aliens and us. To interact with Japanese, he had to be taught how to do do smallest things in certain ways, so as not to offend them inadvertently. For example, there is a right way and a wrong way to accept a business card from someone. It is mandatory that you pause and read the person's name in the card. To tuck it away without reading it would be rude. Japanese is endlessly fascinating, he says. It's like watching alternate history. Even though they've experienced the same recent major events as the Western society, such as World War II, they've spun it into something completely different.

Joan Vinge thinks that may have been the case in the past, but in the era of globalization Japanese aren't as opaque to us as they used to be. Still she thinks James Clavell "Shogun", a novel of 16th century Europeans' exploration of Japan, is an excellent first contact story.

Taylor Anderson, Ann Aguirre, Joan Vinge, and Chris Roberson in the Aliens panel.

An aside. Not long ago, as I wrote about Lithuanian science fiction fandom, I mentioned being mildly annoyed that every cultural discussion was accompanied by a refrain "Orientals are soooo different from us! Don't try to understand them, lest you go crazy!" Yet I didn't find myself rolling my eyes at this discussion, probably because it approached those differences -- which are real, no doubt -- without employing that vague catch-all notion of spirituality. Once you start down the "orientals are sooo spiritual, and their spirituality is sooo different" track, that's when my eyes glaze over. Otherwise, yes, I agree, there are many cultural differences, and in some ways they are opaque to us.

Back to the panel. So, human societies and animal behavior as models for your aliens? Ann Aguirre chose the latter. She based her aliens on praying mantis. This has an advantage that when she gets fan mail asking how do her aliens have sex -- and she gets those letters at least once a week! -- she can tell them to Google it. Hint: sexual cannibalism. :-)

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon: why a fantasy writer should develop an interest in solid waste management

What would a city built by pirates look like? The decorations would be haphazard, because it's all from loot. Your loot might not have enough angels' statues to decorate the entire building, so you'll have angels next to gargoyles. That's the opinion of Rob Rogers, who explored the concept of a pirate town in his novel "Devil's Cape". Stuff like that is discussed on perennial panels on world building -- a crucial part of every science fiction or fantasy novelist's job. Maybe because it wouldn't be right to just reuse panel titles from last year, this year's panel was focused on City Building ("Creating a city that both works for your story, and makes sense for the world it is in.") There was the usual advice on the importance of consistency in city building, like in all world building if you want to have 10000 monkeys in the story, start with that city that could support 10000 monkeys. Don't just put it in as an afterthought in the middle of an agrarian country, or you may discover that it will support at most 8000 monkeys! (Scott Lynch).

Scott Lynch, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Rob Rogers, and Vincent Docherty in the City Building panel.

Scott Lynch also suggests that if you want to get a handle on realistic city-building, try to develop an interest in solid waste management. Combing through other people's waste used to be a major part of people's pastime in medieval and even early industrial times. Masses of poor people would wade in the sewers, capturing lumps of waste, and picking out anything that was remotely valuable, discarded by upper classes. In Victorian England cities, that had long outgrown their medieval infrastructure, there were thousands of people involved in the business of transporting other people's "nightsoil". All this was a subject of Steven Johnson's book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World", that Scott Lynch got his wife for Christmas. That's the kind of guy he is! :-) (In his defense, he said his wife is a biology major, and fascinated by pathogens.) Even if you are not into pathogens, stuff like this surely helps a fantasy writer to create a realistic medieval world.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon: first draft in Icelandic, and other advice for writers

All the advice that could be given to beginning authors has already been mentioned in my posts from writing workshops of the past (you can find more of them by clicking the "writers' workshop" tag under this post). Overall, I'm afraid all that could be said about speculative fiction has already been said in my earlier posts from ArmadilloCon and other conventions. There's no point in repeating it, so what's left? Jokes. Thankfully, jokes at ArmadilloCon are fresh every year, which is amazing, because the people are the same.

The writers who taught the ArmadilloCon writing workshop were trying to one-up one another on how badly they sucked when they were just starting out. Sharon Shinn: I'm a poster child for perseverance. I wrote 10 books before I sold one. Chris Roberson: I wrote 11 books before one sold. Sharon: But I wrote three or four after I sold the first one, that never sold. Scott Lynch, this year's Guest of Honor, can top that: he wrote 12 unpublished novels, many of them in high school. He never finished any of them before he wrote a novel that actually sold (I assume he's talking about "The Lies of Locke Lamora"). Thus, the skeletons in his closet are malformed embryo skeletons.

On revising your work: Most pros recommend completing the first draft of the book before revising, rewriting, or editing it. The alternative -- revising after you finish each chapter or page -- is not so good. Jim Frenkel, a Tor editor, says George R. R. Martin is an exception in that respect, and the worst role model to a beginner writer. "He doesn't go to on to write an new page until the previous page is perfect. And you wonder why his next book is taking so long?"

Sharon Shinn recalls what someone else has said on this topic. "Revising while you write is like drinking decaf coffee in the morning. Great idea, wrong time. Your first draft should read like it was hastily translated from Icelandic by a non-native speaker."

Ah, so I must be doing something right!

In other encouraging news (see, I said it was going to be all jokes, but there is some useful advice in there): yes, you can find time for writing. Julie Kenner wrote her first 15 books while working full-time as a lawyer, and the last seven of those with babies and small children (she has two). Martha Wells wrote some of her first books while being constantly distracted. At that time she worked in tech support, where she wrote programs in KOBOL. She worked on her novels while the programs compiled and ran. Her desk was in a very small space, surrounded by mainframe computers whose hard drives constantly made clicking noises. And since she was in tech support, people would drop in and ask questions all the time. So now she needs distractions in order to write, such as a television in the background.

I wonder which of my bad habits will one day turn out to be an unexpected blessing.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery. There are only a few of them there, but I'm adding new pictures every day.

Science fiction fandom camp in Lithuania: applied demonology

Aurelijus Katkevičius, the editor of a magazine "Verslo Klasė", stopped by at the science fiction fandom camp for a couple of hours. He gave a talk (here's a picture) "On applied demonology, or how to overcome a writer's block". A surprising combination of subjects, you'd say? Those were supposed to be two different lectures, of which he asked us to choose one; since we couldn't choose, he combined them. So, how are demonology and writer's block related?

When you hit a wall in your writing, there are several ways to get yourself unstuck, and most of them are based on the notion that once you start writing anything and do it for long enough, the magical writerly juices will start flowing, and you'll know how to proceed with your work. You could write about what's in front of you, like a cup that's sitting on your desk, or be Zen about it: surrender to your block, and write about how stuck you are. Or you could examine your character in detail. This is where applied demonology comes into play. If your character is a demon, you can create an entire science around him or her. You can determine what class, genus, and species he/she/it is, where does he live, what are his feeding habits, etc. You can write all this down on paper. It probably won't make it into the final draft of the story, since infodumps are typically unnecessary. But regardless if your character is a demon or anything else, the detailed examination can give you an insight into what his past and his condition would motivate him to do at a particular point in the story, thus giving you ideas how to proceed with the plot.

This method has actually worked for me, and I've figured it out just recently. When I'm drawing a complete blank on how to proceed with the plot, I try to visualize a secondary scene that does not appear to be important to the plot at all. I write it out in detail. And inevitably some important aspects of the characters' behavior, or of the world my novel is set in, emerge and become "hooks" for the further chapters of the book.

At least I thought that was the connection between demonology and writer's block. Then there is another angle: writer's block may be caused by demons each of us harbors. It seems that any discussion on intellectual matters in Lithuania must at some point pay homage to cliches about the Orient. It is mandatory to say that it's a place where people Know Something We Don't, and we Should Not Even Try To Get It, lest we go crazy. I personally don't believe in any kind of special oriental wisdom, definitely not as a better alternative to a technological way of living; while I do know that people in those countries arrange their life's priorities somewhat differently than us (collectivism versus individualism), I don't see it as a manifestation of wisdom. But to voice dissenting opinions in a conversation where everybody seems to take this for granted would mean at least to start a debate no one is interested in having. And of course, that would be rude.

We also chatted about the state of book publishing in Lithuania. It's not great, though not disastrous either. Science fiction is still being published in Lithuania, mostly translations of English / U.S., and Russian SF. Several speculative fiction and horror novels by Lithuanian authors had been published over the last decade, as well as a few anthologies of short stories. However, genre magazines do not survive. There are currently no exclusively science fiction / fantasy / horror magazines in Lithuania.

I asked if any Lithuanian publishing houses were publishing stuff electronically for e-book devices such as Kindle; to everyone's knowledge, none do. Electronic publishing in Lithuania may be a non-starter for the simple reason that piracy is so prevalent in Lithuania. I can't completely understand, though, why isn't piracy enough of an hindrance to electronic publishing in the US, or UK, or other developed countries. Do people in those countries obey the laws more willingly, or are there not-so-obvious technological reasons for that?

New pictures from the camp (with English and Lithuanian captions) have been added to my photo gallery.

Science fiction fandom camp in Lithuania, part 1

While I was in Lithuania this year, I went to a science fiction fandom camp. The camp is put together by members of Dorado science fiction club of Vilnius, Lithuania, but is open to anyone interested in the genres of speculative fiction. There were around 20 people, and we all lived for 3 days in what could be described as a cabin in the woods, 2-3 people to a room, with an outdoors toilet and no showers. Then I found out there were empty rooms in another house nearby, which had a shower and bathrooms, and I moved there for the last night.

The camp has been taking place annually for a number of years in a scenic rural place between hills and lakes that's also a home to an observatory. So it's the right setting for speculative fiction lovers. The camp started out as a writers' retreat. Over the years, writing took a backseat to relaxation activities, such as swimming, hiking, volleyball, movies, games and chatting.

This year, my first year at the camp, there was only one creative writing task, prepared by Lina. She had us exercise our writerly muscles by writing what she called a "shadow prose". We each could choose one of five speculation fiction texts about 10-12 sentences long. We had to write our own prose between the sentences of the original text, while preserving its coherence. Two of the texts were well known -- "Alice in Wonderland" and Robert Silverberg's "To See the Invisible Man" (a great story, which is why I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole). Another two were excerpts from Lithuanian SF authors stories. The fifth one was Microm%C3%A9gas by Voltaire. Wikipedia cites this story as a "significant development in the history of literature because it originates ideas which helped create the genre of science fiction". It's a satirical story about a giant (many miles tall) from a planet orbiting Sirius. The premise did not appeal to me, and after reading an excerpt it was clear that it was one of those stories that has survived purely because of its historical significance. It's a pain to read, too. Every sentence in it runs on for a paragraph. So of course, I took it on as a challenge. I tried to follow Voltaire's style, which wasn't difficult because I have a natural inclination to be verbose. The result may have preserved the spirit of the story, but it wasn't funny (not that the original was either). So my story got very few votes. Stories that got the most votes were the ones that were fun to read. One of the best, written by SielojRamiakas, employed a very simple method of "mirroring" the original onomatopoeically (if there is such a word). I realize I'm not making myself very clear. It's one of those "you had to be there" things. It had the audience in stitches.

So, it's fair to say that the purpose of the task was not so much to improve one's writing, as to provide a break from the tough business of relaxation, and to bring the campers together for half an hour of laughter.

I'll write more about the camp in my upcoming posts.

Pictures from the camp (with English and Lithuanian captions) are in m photo gallery.

8 minutes: an implausible concept

I heard of a science fiction story contest, called "8 minutes" (http://www.8minutes.info/). The premise is this:

"The Earth is 8 light minutes away from the Sun. Something has happened to the Sun. Maybe it's gone nova, been transformed, been replaced or stolen or...? But in 8 minutes everything will change for life on Earth."

I like to write theme-based stories. A theme suggests an idea and gets my creative juices flowing. As the story progresses, it often deviates from the theme, until there's very little of the original idea left in it. I don't mind that because I don't treat themes rigorously. To me they serve merely like grains of sand around which a pearl crystallizes. (Not that I would compare my stories to pearls. :-)) Of course, deviating from the theme wouldn't do if I wanted to submit a story to a theme-based anthology, but I don't do that either.

I was especially intrigued by the 8-minutes contest, because it's based on an idea that's not very meaningful at the surface. Since the light travels 8 minutes from Sun to Earth, anything that happens in or to the Sun, will only be discovered 8 minutes later on Earth. You can't really write a thriller here, unless it was made of one sentence. "They didn't know what hit them." You can't reuse any of the old formulae. In the face of global panic, there will be no square-jawed hero who steps up in the 11th hour -- make that the 7th minute -:-) and saves the Earth. For one, there will be no global panic. Nobody, including the hero, will know what will happen to the world. So the plot would have to be about people going about their daily lives not knowing that the disaster will strike. Not exactly a typical plot for a genre story. Though on the other hand, there is this small, but notable meme in science fiction, people living ordinary lives while all hell is breaking loose. It's not one of my favorites, though.

The only other possibility is that somehow humans were notified of the disaster ahead of time. In that case 8 minutes are not meaningful. They probably had many more than 8 minutes to prepare -- or to stick their heads in the sand, as the case may be. Either scenario is not compliant with the theme.

That said, I've come up with an idea for a story that bypasses the obstacle inherent in the concept, and meets the parameters of the contest. Time will tell if I'll succeed. Like I said, my stories often veer away from the original theme and thus become ineligible for the submission. What's worse, I'm thinking this could only work as a comical story -- and I'm the person who on several occasions has proudly admitted not having a sense of humor. That spells success right here. :-) In any case, I'll probably miss the deadline for the contest (I write at a glacial pace) and the point will be moot.

UPDATE1: I've been told Larry Niven has done this theme very well in "Inconstant Moon". I'll have to check it out.

UPDATE2: Checked it out. Some things in the Wikipedia synopsis of this story made me ponder:

"However the narrator surmises that the Sun has gone nova, the day side of the Earth is already destroyed [...]." Wait, he thinks it's possible that the day side of the Earth is destroyed, but nobody has heard it on television or radio? Well, maybe in the year 1971 it was typical for the news to travel with a huge delay, I don't know. It just seems weird.

More importantly, if the Moon is glowing bright, then the sunlight from the "accident" has already reached the Moon -- and the Moon is only a light-second or so away from Earth, is it not? So there is no 8-minute buffer built in here. That said, the idea of Larry Niven's story is definitely similar to that of "8 minutes", only more workable.

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Fencon writers' workshop

It is amazing how people who write stories I can't relate to at all, also are able to give useful critique on my story, as different as it is from theirs. It makes me feel that much worse when the only critique I can give them is a polite version of "this story sounds like a recount of Dungeons & Dragons adventure. Could you put an original idea or two into it?" It's even worse when it turns out the majority of the group loved the story, and I'm the only one there who found it "bla". I still don't know how to critique a story not based on my personal taste, but looking at it through the eyes of potential audience. I.e. if it is a run-of-the-mill fantasy, how do I put myself in the shoes of an audience who can't get enough of run-of-the-mill fantasy, instead of counting its strict adherence to the genre against it?

Then again, I am capable of finding merits of stories in the genre I don't like, and having an interesting, complex character would be one of them. Such a story could potentially interest me despite being not my genre. However, just like there are people who read science fiction not for characters, but for the inner workings of the science-fictional world, there are probably people who read fantasy not for characters, but for the mechanics of the fantasy world. Those people would probably satisfied with a garden-variety fantasy plot. I just can't put myself in their shoes.

Some pictures from the writers' workshop and from Fencon in general can be found in my photo gallery.

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About the writers' workshop from personal perspective

I got some useful critique. But the main points I would need to address to make my story better are nearly impossible to implement due to their paradoxical nature. As I said before, I chopped my story down from almost 8000 words to a little over 5000 words. Naturally, a lot of action and dialogue was cut out. So what was the main advice I got from people who critiqued my story? They wanted to see more dialog and action in some places, showing how certain things happened, instead of just being told in one paragraph "this is what happened". But those were exactly the places where I compressed 2-3 pages into one paragraph! Ironically, they also said I should cut down the story to 5000 words and I may be able to sell it. So, expand it and cut it down. Thanks so much. :-)

To be sure, I'm not blaming the people in the critique group for contradictory advice. It is not their job to be consistent. :-) Their job is to point out the flaws they saw. They are not obligated to also figure out how to fix them. Any kind of feedback is valuable, even if it's contradictory. I have nothing but thanks to the people in my group. But... I still feel the universe is laughing at me. ;-)

The ArmadilloCon aftermath wasn't all bleak. While it's not a direct consequence of the writers' workshop, I got some metaideas on how to salvage my earlier story ideas. Some fairly good ideas from my earlier stories that were so bad they aren't worth rewriting, can be cannibalized into new stories, that will hopefully be short. (Who am I kidding? my inner voice whispers.) However, I started to approach my story ideas by calculating how many scenes it would take to tell a story. I think that to fit under 5000 words a story should have no more than 2-3 scenes. I'm sure other people's mileage would differ, but for me, this calculus is pretty accurate.

Oh -- the bat-watching after the Thursday's pre-ArmadilloCon dinner unexpectedly turned out fruitful for me! While not expecting to see anything more than an underwhelming stream of black specks flowing out from under the Congress bridge, I saw an older man in a skimpy, sparkly cheerleader's uniform, milling about in the crowd. I joined several tourists in snapping a picture of him. He obligingly posed against the Austin downtown skyline. Later I found out this was actually the elusive Leslie, the "keep Austin weird" icon! I say elusive, because for all I've heard about Leslie, I've never seen him -- and I've lived in Austin 9 years! So, now I know that unlike Santa Claus, he actually exists.

ArmadilloCon writers' workshop: pros' advice and a story construction game

The writers' workshop started with advice panels on writing. Some of the advice the pros gave was debunking common writing myths, so in a way it was metaadvice. Sheila Williams, the editor guest of honor, shared some good, compelling pieces of wisdom. It's all the more valuable coming from the mouth of the Asimov's editor. She identified mistakes made by beginning authors with accuracy that made me hang my head down in embarrassment a s I recognized myself making them in my own writing.

Then Don Webb conducts an audience participation game. He and the audience collaboratively construct outlines for two genre stories: an immuno-defficient woman in a bubble encounters a giant germ (horror) and a little slave boy in the 19th century American south meets aliens (science fiction). For this, the audience needs to decide: the story's genre (SF, F or H), who is the protagonist, where or when the story is taking place, and, most importantly, what is the driving force for the story. If it's horror, what is the protagonist afraid of? If they are aliens, what do they want?

After the critique sessions, ArmadilloCon guest of honor John Scalzi gave a closing speech for the workshop students on the power of suck -- why a beginning writer should suck as hard as he/she can. :-)

The whole article can be found in my web site.

The pictures from the writing workshop and the rest of ArmadilloCon 2008 can be found on my web site.

Writing, a semi-failure

I finished my story for the Fencon writers' workshop. Alas, it's not something I can be proud of. I tried to write an original story, and as always, even when trimmed to the minimum, it was 3 times as long as the word quota (the magical 5000 words). So instead I dusted off one of my older stories that could be easily chopped down to 5000 words, and submitted it. This is so dispiriting. I wonder if I'll ever be able to write a story that fits the guidelines (well, obviously, I did that a few times in the past, but I'm afraid it's not reproducible). I'm going to try now to expand my latest story into a full-blown novel (or at least a novella), filling it in with more characterization (ha! who am I kidding?) and more worldbuilding, and then see if I could take just one episode and make a story out of it. The problem is that a story must stand on it own: it should not require additional background, and it should achieve resolution in the end -- and I'm not sure that's possible to do within the setting I'm writing about. What a conundrum.