Author Archives: fictorians

A guest post by James Van Pelt.

By necessity, talking about “likes” explores only the reader’s internal landscape, at least if we talk about published work. Stephen King, for example, said, “Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.”

What a great snark! But Twilight has sold over 100 million copies. At least some people disagree with Stephen King.

If we’re talking about what we “like” in work that is published, and then compare it to unpublished work, the lines between the good and bad seem more distinguishable (but hardly written in stone—John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces was rejected numerous times during Toole’s lifetime, and when his mother tried marketing it after his death, it received seven more rejections before being published and then later won the Pulitzer Prize).

So discussions of what one likes best and what doesn’t work is seriously, severely, and irredeemably personal.

That said, I disliked Stephen R. Donaldson’s first book in the Thomas Covenant series, Lord Foul’s Bane. I don’t think it was the level of the prose that bothered me (because prose problems put me off in a hurry—I had the hardest time with Nicholas Sparks’ The Bridges of Madison County), but I really didn’t like Thomas Covenant himself. I couldn’t root for a guy who seemed like a walking pity party, who didn’t believe that the cool stuff that was happening to him was really happening, and who raped the only decent character he met in the book. I had students talk to me about Donaldson’s series who said, “Oh, you have to keep reading. By the time you get to the third book, it starts to get good.”

Sorry, that’s too far for me to go with a character I don’t like.

I had the same problem with Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Grossman can flat out write, and sentence by sentence he is a wonder, but Quentin Coldwater, his main character lacks any sense of wonder. Amazing things happen to him. In fact, all of his childhood dreams come true, but no matter what happens, his attitude is, “So now what?”

“So now what?” is the killer of ambition. “So now what?” makes all achievement worthless. You can do magic, but so now what? You find the person you love most loves you back, but so now what? You become king, but so now what? As much as I liked the prose, I couldn’t bring myself to read the second book. I told someone that The Magicians felt to me like, as others have pointed out, Catcher in the Rye meets Hogwarts, and Catcher in the Rye didn’t work for me either.

Good prose and great characters work best for me. I loved Jeff Johnston in Connie Willis’ beautifully written Lincoln’s Dreams. I thought Jo Walton created a wonderful character in Mori in Among Others, and Neil Gaiman brought to life Richard Mayhew for Neverwhere.

Good characters go a long way for me. If the character is combined with compelling prose, I’m hooked I can’t put the book down. Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes are transported by Bradbury’s poetic prose, as is Schmendrick in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, and so is Stephen Huxley in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood.

I was on a panel on characterization at WorldCon with Terry Pratchett once. He said that what most often made characters fail for him as a reader was when they were “pluckless.” Characters should have pluck, he said. They should fight to achieve their dreams and try to maintain their sense of selves, even if they are in hopeless situations. I agree with him.

If the writer can combine characters who strive for themselves with sentences that not only don’t stumble over themselves but soar on their own, then I will be a happy reader.

James Van Pelt has sold over 100 short stories to many of the major science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines. His work has appeared in numerous ‘year’s best’ anthologies. He also has been a Nebula and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer finalist. When he’s not writing, he teaches high school and college English in western Colorado. Read his latest collection short science fiction and fantasy stories, FLYING IN THE HEART OF THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE, or find out more at http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com

The Dreamer

November 6, 2014

fictorians

Craft & Skills Narrative Voice Reading 1 Comment

A guest post by Brenda Sawatzky.

When I think of my most memorable dreams, I remember those that had me ruminating for the entire day. Possibly even for days after. They’re the kind of dreams you can’t wait to share with someone and have them respond, open-mouthed, “Wow. That’s fantastical, creepy, outlandish…”

I love waking on those mornings with a story fabricated from my subconscious. At least the stories that don’t have a sharp macabre edge to them, causing me to spend my day vanquishing the monster that lurks even after I’ve subjected my skin to a series of firm pinches.

I love discussing the varied nature of dreams, too. Do we dream in Technicolor or black and white? Are they multisensory? Where do these preposterous expressions of our imagination originate, and do they have some underlying meaning?

One thing I know for certain: if my brain is capable of concocting sensational stories in my sleep, then there is a way to tap into that vein while conscious, too. Some authors seem to be extraordinarily good at that. The truth is, I’m not particularly partial to fantasy novels or sci-fi. That’s not the kind of sensational I’m drawn to. Rather, it’s the prose that creates a dream-like landscape; a vivid, multisensory experience that takes normal to a different level. Like a being on a psychedelic LSD trip at a 3D movie with surround sound.

One such author I’ve recently discovered is Thomas Trofimuk in his novel Waiting for Columbus. It is a tale of a man, discovered lost on the streets of Spain and committed to a mental institution, who believes he is Christopher Columbus. He regales Nurse Consuela with fantastic stories of ships, conquests, and fifteenth-century adventures. The mystery of his true identity and the wonder of his perceived one holds Consuela captive as she’s swept away in his storytelling.

Trofimuk is a dreamscape artist. From the very first page, he attempts to lift the lackluster veil through which we witness the everyday. For a moment you believe that the moon speaks and you wonder if you just haven’t been listening. He writes, “There is only the sound of distant thunder, a barking dog and the sound of the moon behind the clouds reflected in a puddle.”

Inanimate objects come to life. “There’s some sort of Celtic symbol tattooed on her thigh. One of the lines of this tattooed design has come loose and wrapped itself around her entire thigh.”

His world is wrapped in “yellow-cracked clouds,” “a moon inescapably trapped in the branches of a tree,” and ships whose movements are “but a tickle on the skin, a brush of a finger along the lower back of the ocean.”

Another such poetic author, for me, is Ann-Marie MacDonald. In her beautiful and poignant novel Fall on Your Knees, Ann takes her reader willingly into the early nineteenth century’s exotic Empire Theatre:

“…the silver screen flickered, and down in the orchestra pit so did the piano. Trills and triplets seemed a natural counterpart to the frenetic dance of light and shadow above. A man in evening clothes has cornered a young woman in slinky nightgown halfway up a clock tower. No narrative preamble required, the shadows lurk, the tower lists, the music creeps the winding stair, the villain spies a grace-note of silken hem and he’s on the chase in six-eight time up to where our heroine clings to a snatch of girlish melody, teetering on the precipice of high E, overlooking the street eight octaves below. Villain struggles with virgin in a macabre waltz, Straus turned Faust, until, just when it seems she’ll plummet, dash her brains on the bass clef and die entangled in the web of the lower stave, a vision in tenor crescendo on to save the day in resolving chords.”

Trofimuk and MacDonald have a keen grasp on multisensory prose. Like a dream, they make the fantastical normal and lift the reader to a place of wonder and gratitude for introducing us to a world that is so much more interesting than the one in which we walk daily.

I strive to learn from these masters. To weave into my craft the kind of surrealism that would otherwise belong to dreams. To become a dreamer while I’m yet awake.

Guest Writer Bio:
Brenda Sawatzky is a relatively new, unpublished writer hailing from the wide-open prairie spaces of southeast Manitoba. She and her husband of thirty-one years are self-employed and parents to five kids (two ushered in by marriage). She is presently working toward fiction and non-fiction writing for magazines and manages a personal blog.

My Computer is Trying to Destroy Me (And Other Writing Fears)

October 28, 2014

fictorians

Guest Posts Publishing Starting a Career Submissions The Writing Life 1 Comment

Guest Post by Megan Grey

With Halloween only a few days away, this is perfect time of year to explore the fears we writers often face. And if my own experience is any indication, we writers have lots of things that can strike terror into our neurotic little hearts: Rejections. Pitch sessions. Criticism. Rewrites. More rewrites. Our laptops deciding to drunk-query our dream agents.

Maybe I should explain that last one.

With my first novel (at least, my first submission-worthy novel) written and rewritten and rewritten again, I faced the much-dreaded next step. It was time to query agents. I spent weeks crafting the perfect query, and researching which agents would (in my estimation) be the best fit. Then I spent a few extra weeks procrastinating sending it, for a host of what seemed like perfectly reasonable excuses at the time, but really boiled down to one: fear.

Late one night, after bolstering my courage with approximately 8.3 pounds of dark chocolate M&Ms (as a Mormon, I don’t drink alcohol or smoke, so I heavily abuse chocolate instead), I readied this perfect query email to one of my top agents, took a deep breath, and hit send.

I was pleased with myself for conquering my fear, and yet something—writers intuition? An extra power of foresight granted me by obscene over-consumption of chocolate?—made me check my sent folder to make sure the email went through.

A quick scan revealed it had indeed sent, and seemed to be formatted fine. I was just about to close it and ease my paranoia with a few extra M&Ms when something horrible caught my eye. At the end of my query, where I could have sworn I had written “Thank you so much for your time“, this email read “Thank yo.”

Thank YO?!? After about a millisecond of debating whether I had the street cred to pull that sort of nonchalance off (I don’t), I quickly decided to send another one. Surely if agents see two of the same queries in their inbox, they’d only read the most recent, right?This seemed my only option. I re-pasted my query into another email, read it through about a dozen times to verify that each and every word was in place, and sent it again.

This time, when I checked the sent folder, my horror doubled. Not only did this one also end with “Thank yo“, but my computer had somehow deleted the latter half of several of my sentences. So now I had two queries to one of the top agents in publishing, both of which made me appear that I was querying while intoxicated. Or a complete idiot. Or, most likely, both.

Full-on panic set in. In between planning the destruction of my laptop, which I was convinced was turning all Skynet for the sole purpose of ruining my writing career, Ienvisioned being blacklisted by every agent and editor in the business. Being unable to show my face at any writing conference, ever. Having to enter the witness protection program just to lead a normal life again.

After a fit of weeping and swearing off both computers and M&Ms forever (obviously not in a sane frame of mind), I crawled into bed next to my peacefully sleeping husband,who was frustratingly unaware that every hope and dream I’d had of a writing career was shattered. As I lay there in bed, it occurred to me to try one last desperate ploy to salvage things. I would send my query again, rewritten from scratch (no copying and pasting) on our desktop computer, one that I could only hope didn’t have some vendetta against me.

So I did. In the subject line of this email, I wrote “Query (please disregard my previous emails, my computer was having issues)”. I sent it. And, lo and behold, after checking thesent folder, this email appeared to have sent exactly as I wrote it. No sentences that mysteriously lead to nowhere. No awkward and ungrammatical uses of slang. Now I could only hope. (And totally run my laptop over with my car in the morning. That was still happening, regardless of the outcome.)

The most I felt I could hope for from this was that the agent would have enough pity forme to not put me on some industry watch list. So I was completely shocked when, only a couple days later, I actually got a partial request from this agent. And though I was eventually rejected, it was a very nice rejection, and didn’t include any kind of restraining order. Since then, my query (my actual query, not the one my laptop decided to send on my behalf) has gotten me several partial and full requests, so I think it’s safe to assume I’m not on an agent blacklist somewhere.

The moral of this cautionary tale (besides never trusting computers) is this: my career didn’t end because of a computer mistake. It didn’t end on my first rejection, or my twentieth. It won’t end if I flub a pitch session, or if some reviewer hates my work. My career will only end if I give in to my dozens of fears about writing. It will only end if I give up.

And the same goes for you.

Guest Writer Bio:

Megan Grey’s fiction has appeared in Fireside, Sybil’s Scriptorium, and One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple UnicornAnthology. You can find out more about Megan by visiting her website at www.megangrey.com.

When the Well Runs Dry

October 27, 2014

fictorians

Balancing Acts Guest Posts Reading Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life No Comments

A Guest Post by Marie Bilodeau

I’ve always seen my career as a long-term one. Whenever I envisioned my future self as a novelist, I pictured a steady growth in sales and popularity. I hardly ever dreamt of immediate bestseller success, since I’d seen so many fizzled careers based on that first, all too successful, difficult to follow up book. I wanted to make sure that I was steady, confident in my own voice and that I kept producing good stories while growing my fan base.

I sold my first book in 2008, followed mere days later by the sale of a second book. Both books were the first of a series. I was thrilled, to say the least. My publishers, both (then related) small presses, had great reputations, and I couldn’t wait to work with them.

One of those books was Princess of Light, first in my Heirs of a Broken Land trilogy. I sold it with the synopses for the next two books (which I kinda-not-really followed in the actual drafting). The agreement was that each book would come out within six months of each other, starting in March 2009. That basically meant that my next year was dedicated to these books. Drafting, rewriting, editing, reviewing final proofs from my publisher, all while maintaining a day job and paying my bills. I’ll admit – quite a few other things dropped from my plate then. Hobbies that weren’t writing related, friends (most of whom I rediscovered after the madness ended), TV shows, cooking… You know, life.

It was a mad rush and I loved it. I lost myself in the Heirs of a Broken Land for a whole year, getting the last two books drafted while bringing all three to print-ready volumes. I lived, breathed and dreamed those books, and because of that, they possess a raw energy that I would now find difficult to reproduce. They’re better for it.

After the last volume, Sorceress of Shadows, came out in March 2010, it was time for my other book, Destiny’s Blood, to release in October 2010 (thank goodness for differing production schedules!). Final edits were sent in (I’d done requested structural edits already, among all the insanity of the Heirs). Oh, did I mention all the media work, books launches, website work, etc. that goes with three released books in a year?

Destiny’s Blood wasn’t even out yet when my wonderfully story-driven and perceptive editor, Gabrielle Harbowy, asked for two more books in the Destiny series.

No problem, I thought. I’ve done this before. With much shorter timelines.

Except, when I came to write it, I blocked. I thought at first it was the story. I hadn’t anticipated returning to the world of Destiny, though I loved the ship and characters very much. But I couldn’t get it to gel. Getting my butt in chair was nearly impossible. Words came out like razor blades – painful, and they left me wounded and a bit on the bitchy side.

It took me a while to realize that I’d burnt out. That the mad dash of Heirs had left my words clunky and my mind tired. Both were now blunted.

I tried to work through it, I really did. I had to inform my editor that I wouldn’t make my deadline for Destiny’s Fall, the second book in the series. My pride has yet to recover.

I decided I‘d take a weekend away at a convent, in a quiet solitary retreat, to work on it. Get maybe another 10,000 words, which might bring me halfway. I wasn’t ready for the silence and being alone with my story. I wasn’t even willing. I was just desperate and tired. I enjoyed a (rare, thank you) meltdown that first night and went home.

Obviously, trying to force the story wasn’t working out.

I took some time to myself. I spoke with other writers. I read books on writing. I read good fiction and got excited about story again. I let myself become immersed in someone else’s world, with no expectations. I rediscovered what I loved about story. How it provides guidelines and inspiration for our own lives. Something to strive for.

After a summer of recharging, I went back to the convent, feeling refreshed and ready to tackle a new challenge. I thought I’d get 10,000 words down. But I’d refilled my story well so effectively that as soon as I opened the floodgates, I couldn’t stop writing. In three fantastic, crazy days, I wrote 45,000 words. I don’t think my fingers stopped. I don’t believe I slept. I just wrote. I let the story carry me.

I learned that refilling my story well regularly is necessary. See pretty things, do stuff I like, talk to friends and read good books. Whatever you need to keep the thoughts inside you fluid, and to keep the words flowing.

It’s worth it. The burn out and the dry well are like razor blades – it’s to all our advantages to avoid bleeding out.

Guest Writer Bio:

Marie Bilodeau is an Ottawa-based storyteller and science-fiction/fantasy writer. Her writings have been nominated four times for Canada’s biggest SF award, the Aurora Awards. Her new dark fantasy series, Nigh, is slotted to be released this November. She’s told stories across Canada in theatre houses, tea shops, bars and under disco balls. Find out more about Marie, her writings and upcoming shows at www.mariebilodeau.com.