Author Archives: Gregory D. Little

While on Facebook earlier this month, I saw a fellow author requesting beta readers for a story she’d just finished. Normally, by the time I see such a post, others have leaped into the breach, and the author has more than enough volunteers. This post was just a few minutes old, so I was the first volunteer.

The story was excellent, impactful and clever and tightly written, not an easy hat-trick to manage. I have no doubt it will find a publishing home. Among my (minimal) feedback, I included in a comment I only reserve for short stories that really speak to me. “This is one of those stories that fills me with unseemly, writerly envy because I didn’t write it!”

I’m confident I’m not the only writer who feels this way. I suspect envy over another writer’s excellent work is something we all have to grapple with from time to time. I remember laughing out loud when Pat Rothfuss blogged about a blurb he’d been asked to provide for Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings and one of his suggested blurbs was “Brandon Sanderson’s writing is so good it’s starting to piss me off.”

A little envy and a latent sense of competition now and then is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. As with most emotions in life, it’s what you do in response to them that marks your character. Below, I’ll break down the spectrum of responses a writer might have to this situation.

Writer’s Envy, a bad response: “I’ll never be able to write anything that good or be that successful, so I might as well give up!” If this is the route your thoughts take, you need to get some perspective. Trust me, no matter how confident the writer may feel about the story, at some point they looked at it and wondered why they were bothering with something so terrible. And that seed of doubt lingers on, sometimes even in the face of positive feedback.

Writer’s Envy, a worse response: “I’ll never be able to write anything that good or be that successful, so I’m going to do everything I can to subvert this person and their career!” Sadly, this can happen, and not just in the field of writing. Don’t be one of the people that makes it happen. Despite what you may think, writing is not a zero-sum game. Have you ever noticed how the more great stuff you read, the more you want to read? We writers are all in this together, and we can all help each other and make things better for everyone, or we can tear each other down and make things worse for everyone.

Writer’s Envy, a response where everyone wins: “Wow, I’m really impressed with this. I should consider what about it worked so well, and see if I can use what I learn to improve my own writing. In fact, seeing this piece of quality work produced by a peer inspires me to go work on my writing right now.”

Real world example time. When I was back in school getting my engineering degree, I learned that my own department, Aerospace Engineering, was very different than the Computer Science department. Computer Science had an email listserv of all its students, and they were permitted to email a certain number of lines of code out to one another to help in figuring out homework programs. It was meant to foster community. Instead, what happened was that certain bad eggs would email out lines of code they knew were wrong, trying to sabotage their fellow students to keep their own class rankings high. What was supposed to be a community of support turned into an ugly morass of paranoia and mistrust.

By contrast, my own department managed to cultivate a tight-knit group of engineers-in-training. The professors encouraged us to work together on homework problems that were too complex by design to be easily solved by one person. This is how engineering works in the real world, and they were trying to replicate that. We students obliged, sometimes staying up all night to finish homework and going out for 4:00 AM McDonalds. The best students often took additional time to help the average students (right here) work through complex concepts they were slower to grasp. It was a tough major, and we needed a good group of guys and gals to get through it with our sanity (mostly) intact. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I’d had to worry about my peers sabotaging me at every turn.

Writing professionally is a tough gig, too. As Kristin talked about earlier this month, in the age of the internet, everyone’s a critic, and someone who doesn’t know your personally isn’t going to be worried about hurting your feelings. This is the value of a writing community. We learn from each other. We lean on each other. And sometimes, we get a little kick in the butt when we see each other succeed and think “I want to feel that way too.”

About the Author: Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little is the author of the Unwilling Souls, Mutagen
Deception, and the forthcoming Bell Begrudgingly Solves It series. As
a writer, you would think he could find a better way to sugarcoat the
following statement, but you’d be wrong. So, just to say it straight, he
really enjoys tricking people. As such, one of his greatest joys in life is
laughing maniacally whenever he senses a reader has reached That
Part in one of his books. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, it doesn’t matter. They
all have That Part. You’ll know it when you get to it, promise. Or will
you? He lives in Virginia with his wife, and he is uncommonly fond of
spiders.

Like a Movie Trailer for Your Head

July 8, 2015

Gregory D. Little

In approaching this month’s topic, I realized something irritating. I’ve already written about my best inspirational stories on previous Fictorians posts. As I had little desire to repeat myself, I knew I had to come at this issue from a different angle. So rather than focus on discrete stories about what’s influenced my writing, I asked myself what techniques I used to get psyched to write day-to-day.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell any of you writers that some days the effort to get started writing can be too much. Unless you are already a professional writer or are both independently wealthy and childless, you spend your days expending energy on something or other that isn’t writing-related. You have to divert energy to writing that could be used elsewhere on higher-priority things, like earning money to eat.

So in order to get any writing done at all, we have to find ways to slip past exhaustion, laziness or a bad case of The Mondays and get excited about it. Quite without meaning to, I stumbled upon an admittedly silly technique a number of years ago that works well for me.

The answer? I advertise my book to myself.

Think about how you felt the last time you saw a really well-done movie trailer. Maybe it brought a rush of excitement you thought you’d left behind with youth. Maybe you watched it over and over again on Youtube just to wring that little rush dry. It makes sense. The people who make movie trailers mostly know their business. Their goal is to get you to mentally commit to seeing the movie in advance, ideally without paying attention to those pesky review aggregate sites before plunking down your hard-earned cash.

Now take your work in progress and try translating it into a movie trailer that you play in your head. Your hero, covered in grit and with a wound on their forehead from all their heroic efforts, stares stoically into the middle distance just to the right of the camera lens. A series of sequences flash by in which characters dodge bullets or spells or leap off of buildings only to turn back around and fire lightning bolts at their pursuers while their hair flows in the wind, all in slow motion with a dramatic swell of the soundtrack.

Writing it out like this makes it seem silly and self-indulgent because it is. You’ve seen these sorts of scenes in a million movie trailers, and after a while they all start to look the same. But guess what? If scenes like this didn’t work, the people making the trailers wouldn’t use them. And there’s one big difference here: these are your characters in your world, both of which you are (hopefully) already excited about. I suspect you’ll feel at least the hint of a giddy little thrill imagining them starring in their own expertly produced movie trailer.

A lucky handful of us may someday write works popular enough in print to be able to see our characters brought to life on the big screen (or the small). For the rest, a little daydreaming can give us that spike of excitement we need to sit down at the keyboard after an otherwise long day.

Give it a try. Don’t worry, you don’t have to admit it to anyone.

Stop Trying So Hard

June 10, 2015

Gregory D. Little

Business Networking The Writing Life 1 Comment

It’s all too easy to think you should always be “on” at conventions and other gatherings of the writerly kind. In most cases, you’ve paid good money to get crammed into a con suite with hundreds of other like-minded souls for a scant few days. The urge to make the most of it, to make this trip be the one that represents your Big Break, can be almost overwhelming. So there you are, pinging way with your active sensors, mentally cataloging all the people you need to talk to, to wow, in order to level up in your writing career.

We’re all so very desperate to get noticed.

But maybe that’s not the way, or at least not the best way. I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever have business on the brain when you meet new people. But keep in mind that a lot of your most important connections will be the friends you make in the industry. There won’t be any fanfare when you meet these people, just the natural click of human connection that’s been going on for millennia. And that’s as it should be.

Though we both attended Superstars (albeit in different years) I first met Evan Braun at World Fantasy Convention in Toronto in 2012. We hit it off immediately over a mutual love of The Wheel of Time, but I didn’t think of it as any sort of connection being made beyond a cool new writer I’d met until Evan got in touch with me several months later, asking if I’d do a guest post for this writing blog called Fictorians. Now here we are three years later, and here I am with my latest post as a regular.

I met Joshua Essoe at Superstars 2012 in Las Vegas. We ended up hanging out a fair amount with mutual friends, and thus got to know each other a bit. Last year, when an opening in his schedule lined up, I hired him to edit my upcoming novel Unwilling Souls based on the great feedback I’d gotten about his editing skills and the fact that I knew he was a cool guy and easy to get along with.

I’ve never actually met recent Fictorians guest poster Holly Heisey in person. We’re Facebook friends through mutual friends (I honestly can’t even remember who). This past March I was in a bind as monthly coordinator for the Fictorians site. I’d had a guest poster forced to bail late in the month due to a family emergency, and I needed someone to fill their vacated slot on short notice. The guest who’d been forced to back out would have been a first-time poster, and I was really looking for another first-timer to replace them, so I messaged Holly and she turned in an excellent post just a few days after I got in touch. I remember being impressed by her professionalism and how easy she’d been to work with. So when she announced several months later that she was taking cover art commissions, I got in touch again and hired her to do the cover art for Unwilling Souls. It turned out to be an excellent decision.

Stop worrying so much about who you need to meet and impress in order to keep to your mental schedule of writing ascendancy. Go to places where writers, editors, artists and fans congregate, either online or in person. Think about these places as fun ways to meet other people who like the same things you like. Be nice and open, someone who other people will want to hang around with. If you are so fortunate as to be offered an opportunity by one of those other people, continue being nice and be easy to work with to boot. The path before you will open up without you even being aware of it. Better yet, it will do so with the help of people you like and who like you in return.

Stop trying so hard.

About the Author: Gregory D. Little

The Submission Sanity Saver

May 7, 2015

Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little Submissions Writing Tools 2 Comments

Are you a disorganized person? It’s okay to admit it. We’re friends here, and this is a safe place. Here, I’ll go first. I am extremely disorganized. I don’t keep a calendar. My desk at work is a mess. I consider organizing things to be a hassle, and I detest hassle. I’ve long skated by on a better-than-average memory. That document from last week? It’s in the third pile on the right, the one that’s teetering on the edge of falling.

The problem is, as I’ve gotten older, my brain has gotten more full and, well, older. My once-vaunted memory has begun to fail me. Sooner or later I’m going to have to admit that, and start being more organized like a normal person. But probably not.

Still, there’s one organizational decision I’ve made that I don’t regret in the slightest: surrendering my short story submission process to Duotrope. Duotrope is a one-stop-shop website for submissions. Short and long fiction, nonfiction and poetry, Duotrope has you covered. They currently list over 5,000 markets, and continuously update their list as new markets become available. They feature a robust search engine where you can specify which criteria you are looking for in a market. They list acceptance rates, pay scale (or lack thereof), average response speed (or lack thereof) and each market’s page on Duotrope links to the market’s main site.

Simply put, I would be utterly lost without Duotrope.

Every time you submit, you complete an entry with the name of your story (stored in your account database), the venue and the date of submission. Duotrope starts counting days. When you get a response, you update the entry, and the site uses your inputs to improve its own venue database. Better still, they keep records of every story you’ve submitted and which markets you’ve submitted it to. They even compare your acceptance rate to others who have submitted to the same market and give you a sense of how you’re doing.

Just this morning I was thinking to myself that I had a story out on submission. I couldn’t remember which venue or, honestly, which story, but I was fairly certain I’d submitted it awhile ago. Surely, I thought, I should have heard something by now. I logged into my account to see if I’d run over the expected amount of time for this market. Turns out my memory just wasn’t so hot (damn you, age!). I’ve still got sixteen days left until the story has been out past this market’s normal response times.

Now for the bad news. While the site was free when I began using it, eventually soliciting donations was apparently not enough to pay their bills. They have since gone to a pay system, which is unfortunate for those without much disposable income, but at $50.oo a year, I consider it a steal and well worth it. They even offer a free trial! If you do a lot of submitting and have been trying to keep track of it all yourself, I strongly suggest you consider giving them a try.