Fiction and Non-Fiction
If you didn’t support the kickstarter for Thrill Ride, the latest issue Gadgets, is arriving on June 21st. I don’t have anything in this issue, but I’ve seen some of the stories and it’s another great anthology.
I can’t tell you to hurry before all copies are gone, because it’s an eBook! However you can get it here where you can avoid the rush: Thrill Ride.
You’ll be glad you did.
I’ve written before about my sister, Margaret, and what a talented weaver she is.
As well as winning many awards, and allowing me to use her work The Alchemist’s Dream as the cover for my book Mageweaver, Margaret is also the driving force behind the conception and continued success of the Heallreaf exhibitions.
Heallreaf started as a small affair at West Dean College in 2015 and has grown each time to Heallreaf 5 with showings in three locations in the UK starting on June 29th at Weston Park in Shropshire. I won’t make it to the Weston Park location, but I am looking at one of the other two – Morley Gallery in London in December 2024 or Farfield Mill in Cumbria from January to April 2025.
Morley Gallery will be easier for me from a travel perspective, but Farfield Mill is just a stone’s throw from the English Lake District. The Lakes have some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and it’s a very, very long time since I’ve seen them so that may be the tie-breaker.
If you get the chance, take the time to visit Heallreaf 5 and the creations of some of the best weaver’s working today. You won’t be disappointed.
Have you ever sat down to watch a TV show or movie, or picked up a book, and in the first few minutes said: this is terrible, but you persist anyway?
This happened to me recently. I was surfing the dozens of channels on my subscription and complaining about how there was nothing to watch.
Not quite true, but I’ve never been into a dozen home shopping channels or following the exploits of housewives in this week’s target city. It was also that time of the evening when movies I might be interested in are well under way, and my cable provider is very unpredictable on which shows get the restart option.
I never thought I’d say it out loud, but there are times when I miss Comcast and Xfinity. Anyway, after the third cycle through the channel guide, I settled on a movie called Trailer Park Shark which was just starting.
Yes, you did read that correctly, and a couple of minutes in, it was about what I expected. “This is awful,” I said more than once. Despite that, an hour later, I was still watching. I may even watch the movie again because there must have been something in the way the story was told that kept me in front of the screen.
I’m sure there’s a learning opportunity there, and techniques I can use in my own writing once I figure them out.
Toward the end of last week, I finished the latest Jacob and Miriam novel. This is the fastest I’ve written a novel, but not the reason for this post.
I write the Jacob and Miriam novels in the third person, and the Jacob short stories in the first person. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write that way, it just happened.
Once the novel was done, I put it aside and turned my attention to a short story – at least I think it’s a short story. It may turn out longer. It’s a Jacob story that came about from a throwaway line in the story A Cousin’s Outing that appears in the Thrill Ride issue Sisters in Arms.
In that story, Miriam makes a comment about a past event, and Gideon makes it a condition of his help to hear the full story about the event.
At the time, I had no idea what that event was, how it came about, or who was involved.
Well, the subconscious mind is a strange thing, and over the weekend, I opened a new Scrivener document and started writing about that event. After about 400 words, I came to a slow stop. Something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure what it was, so back to the top and reread from the beginning. As I did so, I found myself changing the viewpoint. With my head still deep in the novel, I automatically wrote Jacob in the third person. As I cycled back through the first paragraphs, I changed from third person to first, and then kept writing.
Because I started late in the day, I didn’t really expect to hit my daily word count, and was quite surprised when I looked up and had blown past it. I don’t think I would have been anywhere close had I persisted with Jacob in the third person. And I even have a title. Keep your eyes peeled for Unwelcome Competition!
It’s nearly two years since I wrote about my iPad purchase in the Brave New World post (May 2022 – Richard Freeborn).
In that post I talked about the keyboard, and how, without email I was able to be quite productive. I am still using the iPad for writing, usually with Scrivener because that’s where my fiction lives these days, but there are a few differences.
About six months ago, I bought a Macally bluetooth keyboard. It’s a full size keyboard with a separate numeric keypad. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that numeric keypad until I had it back again. Another feature of the Macally keyboard is the ability to connect up to three devices and switch between them seamlessly, with just a quick hoy-key combination.
It was very easy to connect the keyboard to the iPad, and much as I still liked the Magic keyboard, being able to sit and type with the correct posture was wonderful. It’s on these occasions that I make use of the separate iPad mouse, which to be honest doesn’t get much other use.
What I haven’t managed yet on the iPad is a heavy editing session where I have two or three or more chapters open in panes on the screen so I can make updates and corrections – like putting consistency into hair or eye color. that’s pretty easy to do on the Mac Mini with a 20+ inch monitor. Not so easy on the iPad where you don’t have the ability to pop out and rearrange documents. To be fair, when I get into those big editing sessions, there’s usually a pile of papers strewn across the desk as well!
Overall though, I’m still very pleased with using the iPad as a dedicated writing device for places away from my office. And I’ve still avoided configuring email!
For those of you who supported the Thrill Ride kickstarter, a big thank you from me, and implied from everyone else with stories in this year’s issues. The kickstarter funded, so expect to see the first issue – Sisters in Arms – within the next few weeks. This issue includes my story A Cousin’s Outing.
It’s been a while since I submitted anything to the top science fiction magazines, but I have stories under consideration at Asimov’s and Analog. Unfortunately at the moment Fantasy and Science Fiction isn’t accepting submissions, but when they open again, there will be several stories in the queue for them.
Elsewhere, I’m making good progress on the third Jacob and Miriam story, and that’s on track for publication at some time in the second quarter of 2024. More news on that closer to the publication date.
This past week my writing study and reading intersected in a way I didn’t expect.
I’m coming to the end of a nine-week class on dialog, and wow, has it been illuminating. In parallel, one of the fiction books I was reading was Beyond – the first of Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy about the founding of Valdemar.
I enjoyed the book but something felt off, and not quite right. I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Not then, but later when I finished working through the lectures on the dialog class, I had a glimmer of an idea.
This week’s topic was narration, and how a writer can use it to give the reader information, and to paraphrase, there’s light narration, heavy narration, journal narration, and whole book narration. The assignment was to find examples of each type.
And there was my answer. Beyond isn’t just heavy narration, the whole book is mostly narration, and that was what disturbed me.
The thing with whole book narration is it tends to keep the reader at a distance, and I wasn’t expecting that from Mercedes Lackey. When you read the other Valdemar books you are deep inside the character’s head feeling their thoughts and emotions, and I kept waiting for that in Beyond.
I read the book almost in one sitting and know I’ll go back and read it again, so although I wasn’t expecting this approach, I suspect the next book in the series – Into the West – will have the same style.
This time I’ll be ready for it. And probably read the book in one session.
Over the past week I’ve written two short stories with the intent of exploring a new science fiction world. I was reasonably happy with the first one, but something didn’t feel right about the second one.
That second story was a murder mystery and I laid out the death, the suspects, and the resolution. The story ended up being a little shorter than I expected, but that wasn’t what bothered me. If I’ve learned one big thing in the past few years, it’s that a story will be as long as it needs to be. There have been multiple occasions where a story I thought would be about 3,500 words ended up being nearly 5,000. And some I thought would be 6,000 words ended up at 3,000!
I had someone read the story, Someone with much much more experience thanI have, and whose opinion I respect. Good writing they said, but you lost me when I realized there was no setting.
Wham! Nailed it in one!
When I reread the story, I knew exactly what they meant, and I realized why the story ended up that way. I had a vision for the location and setting – a tropical beach on a planet somewhere in the Milky Way – but I didn’t see it. For example, as I was writing, I didn’t have a feel for what the restaurant looked like, how the tables were set, the attitude of the wait staff, the views from the windows, the smells coming out of the kitchen. All those little things that make the story real for the reader.
I thought about the story a lot during my walks this past weekend. I still like the premise of the mystery, and the implied potential for other stories in that same world. I’m thinking I’ll write the story again, from a different character viewpoint, and see what happens to it. It will be a month or two as first, I have a novel to finish.
A week or so ago I was catching up on some motivational videos that covered reviewing 2023 and planning for 2024 when the presenter talked about time in the chair and the correct position.
Time in the chair made complete sense. If I write on average 1,000 words an hour, then if I spend three hours “in the chair,” that’s 3,000 words. Of course that shouldn’t be a single three hour block. I’ve tried that and everything gets stiff, my eyes start to cross, and to be honest, I can’t focus on a story for that long. I know, I’ve tried and my brain turns to mush just as I start the third hour.
The key in this instance is to take a break every hour or so. I tried that this month and it really makes a difference. Even five minutes away from the desk helps reset your thoughts and lets you sit down again with fresh ideas.
It was the second comment – correct position – that initially confused me. Then, I listened and understood. Get a chair the right height for your desk. Sit straight, feet on the floor, knees at ninety degrees. Use a keyboard, don’t try and work across the trackpad on a laptop.
Full disclosure. I’m a bit of a sloucher in a chair, and no surprise, it makes my back sore. After listening to the video a second time, I changed how I sit at my desk. It felt strange at first, but after fifteen minutes or so, it felt more natural, and I seem to be getting more words written as well.
Sometimes we have to return to basics to move forward.
It seems hard to believe we are already half way through 2023. It doesn’t seem that long ago since we were coming down from the New Year festivities, and wondering when it wold warm up. Now we’re into those hot, heavy, humid summer days and wondering when it will cool down.
Back in December, I had six writing projects in mind, and no surprise I’m still working on the first one. There are some reasons for that – multiple day-job projects that only really calmed down in April, and if I’m honest, no real planning to accommodate those projects and the writing. The result has been the lowest six month word count in a long time, which I wasn’t happy about, especially when I looked at a “completed” chapter and found a series of annotations that reminded me the chapter wasn’t as completed as I thought.
Yesterday I took a hard look at the manuscript and found some more not quite completed chapters. Mapping that tidy up, and the chapters still to write to a calendar for the next quarter gave me a schedule. The schedule also includes the first part of the trilogy I mentioned back in December and some short stories that got started and ground to a halt. I added those in so I could at least acknowledge Heinlein’s second rule for writers (You must finish what you write).
I’ll keep you posted.
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