There’s persistence in this business. It’s how the majority of us writers get published.
I was thinking about persistence today at work and how it feels oftentimes that I am busting my butt for nothing. I realized that this was the same exact feeling I got back in 2009 when I hadn’t sold a book in over two years. I was writing, submitting, getting past the first stage of submissions and then… nothing. It felt as though nothing was going right and I wasn’t ever going to get past those two books I sold way back when.
It was… depressing, to say the least.
I finally made some headway early this year when I contracted a short story. And Injustice For All was a decent story, but it go my foot back into that door. My spirits cheered. I was unconquerable.
How many writers suffer from that depressed feeling, I wonder. How many of them just give up because, quite frankly, it’s really not worth the time, blood, sweat and tears we put into a book. You have better luck playing the lottery than being the next J.K. Rowling, yet more people try to be writers than regularly play the lotto. Strange, right?
So how do you stay honest with yourself and your writing without spiraling into that deep, dark abyss?
So today Sarah Hoyt is talking about outlining over at her blog. It’s a fascinating piece that really can help aspiring authors (if they’re really looking for help rather than finding a medium to bitch to about how the publishing world is out to get them) and actually made me stop and think about my own outlining process.
…crap. I forgot to mail out the contract for Crouching Seal, Sleeping Dragon this morning while out. Gah. Will do so when I go back out again…
More deadlines approaching, most of which I’m eyeballing with a tad bit trepidation. I’m honestly worried that I might, for the first time since 2005, not finish a novel this year. Granted, I have 4 of them in the “almost completed” stage (which would make 2012 a banner year for me), but having to restart Wraithkin killed 2011. Ah well, such is life I suppose. It’s not as though I’m annoyed at myself for not finishing Wraithkin, but annoyed with Wraithkin for being such a difficult story to tell. I never thought that the prototypical Romeo and Juliet story would be so hard. It’s almost as thought the ghost of Shakespeare is hovering over my shoulder, berating me for my desire to rewrite that Scottish play and fix his mistakes in Macbeth (and rename it Duncan, since we’re telling what really happened).
No, I doubt I’ll ever write it; but it’s there, waiting, which could mean that Shakespeare is there as well, watching.
…as if having Ganeesh around wasn’t bad enough, now I’ve got William flippin’ Shakespeare…
…you do realize that I could write a heck of a play based on this alone? Huh.
Exhaustion is laying waste to my sanity.
This is exciting. I have named it Godzilla.
Exhaustion, not my sanity.
Now that I am (more or less) settled into my new place, I can start doing Shiny Book Review once more. I’ll have to contact all those poor publishers who had been holding off sending us more books to review (oh, woe is them, right?) and let them know that we are back fully and raring to go.
I discovered that Doc Travis (Dr. Travis S. Taylor), a good friend of mine, is getting another show on NatGeo this fall. I’d heard about it before but today was the first time I was actually able to confirm it. Here is the link for those of you who are interested. I hope that people will give his show a chance– he’s a very sharp guy who can explain particle physics in layman’s terms. I didn’t enjoy all of his books, but I do like most of them.
As for me, well, I finished The Cold second draft last night after work and need to clean it up. I’m closing in on finishing up my War Bride story, tentatively titled The Poet Bushido. I also have been making progress on the Catechism story (A Promise Made), though I’m going to be pushing the deadline on that one. However, so far I am on schedule for my goals of what I need to finish for 2011. Well, for the short stories at least. Still working on that rewrite of Wraithkin, as well as The Green Jewel and The Midnight Crew.
Stupid novels…
Having some fun with the new phone. It takes pictures. I leave you with this for now.
Just trying out my website features with my iPhone. I have it set up so that it looks decent if you follow this on a smart phone or tablet.
This is sooooo dang cool.
So I was doing some more thinking today about Wraithkin and the series as a whole, and comparing a lot of it to today’s society. I wasn’t pleased with my thought process.
Someone asked on Facebook the other day “When did you decide to be straight?”, in regards to an argument about whether or not someone chooses to be gay or is born that way. I realized that forcing gays to be spayed and neutered like anyone else in my universe who is not genetically Perfect would be reasonable, due to the argument that they do not choose it (long argument for and against, I’m not getting into it… not my fight) and are born gay. A society which prides itself on Perfection as a species would look down at homosexuality the most, due to some beliefs that they choose to be an Imperfect. This would piss off Perfects more than anything else, because to most of them (let’s say the elite Upper House of Lords, who are the hereditary parliamentarians) think that any of those who turn their back on Perfection should be punished the worst.
…the mind boggles.
And yet, I can’t find a flaw in my reasoning. It pains me to admit that this behavior towards homosexuality in my fictional universe is absolutely reasonable by their society standards. Remember, this is a culture that if you test positive for the genetic trait for a type of (easily treatable) cancer, you are shunned, castrated (or worse) and can never own property or be a regular Citizen of the Dominion.
Marriage?
Yeah, good luck with that, buddy.
I’m trying to keep this series from being about society and more about the love story that it is (think Macbeth meets Armor), but the more I flesh out the universe I’m writing (was partway done with Book 2, but am rewriting Wraithkin due to the flaws in the armor of the suits and all that…) the more I’m discovering that while the Dominion of Man is a definite step up from the Islamic oligarchy ruling Earth, it’s still a crappy place to live when compared to our own society today.
*sigh* Grim, dark, depressing and yet… humorous. Adventurous, splashed with a healthy dose of unrequited love and loyalty.
It’s going to be a helluva good book when it’s done.
I still don’t have the internet at my new place, so for now I’m forced to come into work 4 hours early to get some work done. It’s not bad (free drinks) but still, hard to work on some stuff while in public. The right ambience is hard to achieve while you’re listening to some Nouveau Paris music.
The Wikipedia Wars continue. I really don’t have the time or inclination to continue fighting facts against a consensus. A consensus, as someone once pointed out, could make 8+8=14. Just because a consensus agreed that 14 is the answer does not make it right. But again, I’m pretty tired of this. Unlike most of the people who I seem to be battling against, I don’t have all the time in the world for petty arguments. I have two careers going on right now; mudslingin’ isn’t helping either of them.
*slings mud as random*
Well, usually.
I hope to have super exciting news within the next few weeks. It involves publishing and books. You can assume anything you want from that.
Thanks for all those poor lost souls volunteers who offered themselves up to the Redshirt gods. I’ve got a good chunk of memorable deaths planned for you all.
Memorable = bloody.
Memorable.
“I gave everything, and all I got was a lousy ‘Thank you for your service’ letter.”
“Better than a closed casket funeral and a flag for momma.”
“…point. But would getting paid on time be too much to ask?”
“And where you going to spend the money? I haven’t seen any sign of a store or something like that since we docked at Belleza Sutil.”
“We’re in a war zone now, doos. Bound to be a whorehouse or something ’round here, right?
– Excerpt from Wraithkin, © 2011 Jason Cordova
Can you see what I’m supposed to be working on right now? Outside the usual “Jason’s bouncing around his fiction worlds like a ferret on speed” moment, I’ve been working on (i.e., editing… yuck, but necessary) something that isn’t in the Wraithkin universe (for the next anthology, Adventurers in Hell). Which is a shame because after running into some science-y problems with my mech suits earlier, I’ve fixed a lot of the problems that have been plaguing the pacing of this book. It’s also became much more fun because I get to expand the amount of characters, since they’re now merely super-soldiers instead of Death’s Walking Incarnate. This means I get to redshirt people!
Line ‘em up!
Seriously, I have a list somewhere with about 20 people who want to die gruesomely in battle against an alien species in a war for the soul of man (don’t ask), but I need… more… bodies. A lot more. Like, probably sixty more dead guys.
What I usually do is look at baseball players who play for teams I despise (yes, I pick on the Red Sox and Phillies a lot in stories) and steal parts of their names for characters. But this gets stale after awhile, since I tend to run out of creative ways to morph Youkilis’s name or, worse still, discover that I have a Cole Ortiz and a David Hamel and want to kill everyone.
Yes, they die brutally, my fellow Braves fans. No worries.
But I’m looking for a few torn and rendered bodies good men (and women, I don’t discriminate) who would like to die gloriously (and not so gloriously… that’s for you, Tim Kelsey, you poor, poor bastard…) in this book. The back story of your character is pretty much the same — you are an Imperfect, genetically “inferior” to the rest of society due to some genetic anomaly in your DNA (propensity for cancer, ADHD, etc) that hasn’t been wiped out yet. You can’t have a job, no special upbringing, probably illiterate (save for a few who were discovered later in life when they applied for a marriage license… and those spots are claimed). However, you are all varying shapes and sizes who are fighting for your Emperor against the alien blight known as the Abassi with the hopes that you will earn a rare “gold” pass which entitles you to all the benefits of your superiors.
This is not leading to a civil war (well, there will be a civil war eventually, but this Perfect/Imperfect differential has nothing to do with it). This society has been operating like this for hundreds of years and, while cruel and harsh to you and I, is typical and accepted because nobody knows any better.
You can describe your genetic flaw in detail. I’ll run with it. I just need bodies (man, I sound like an undertaker now…).
susceptible to strokes? Born with a cleft palate? Partially deaf? Then the Dominion of Man is looking for you! Service of five years guarantees your gold pass and a shot at life. See a recruiter for more details!
Leave comments below if interested… and details…
London’s burning, and Tehran is asking for the London police to exercise restraint during the riots.
…seriously, I did not pull this off of The Onion.
Irony aside (or is that not irony? I get so confused…), I’m currently bogged down with writing. Updating here is becoming difficult as I prepare to move into my new apartment (yay!), bought a new bed (boo!… yay!), and spent pretty much all of my savings (BOOOO!!!) in doing so. Posting will definitely be sporadic the next few weeks as I get the internet hooked up and find a new desk (Staples has the one I want… anybody wanna buy a book?).
Other than that, I’ve been trying to meet deadlines while working full time. Go team deadline!
…sigh. That never works.
I love deadlines. I love the “whooshing” sound they make as they fly by – Douglas Adams.
Monster Hunter International
Damn you, Larry Correia!
My posts don’t usually start off as kindly as this, but this morning I had this horrible epiphany for Wraithkin, due to a Larry Correia (author of Monster Hunter International, Monster Hunter Vendetta, Monster Hunter Alpha, and so on) post I happened across from a year or so ago. It was basically some writing advice about SF weapons that I’d somehow missed. It was enlightening and interesting (as most of Larry’s blog posts are), until I got to the part about the TANSTAAFL and weaponry.
TANSTAAFL, for those of you who somehow don’t know what that is, translates to “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”. It applies to everything. Including, unfortunately for me, to your SF novel and hardware involved.
Mistake #1 — Where’s the ammo?
I love mech suits, the concept behind them. I love the idea of armored soldiers in impenetrable armor striding across a battlefield, death blazing from their guns, scything down the alien menace. I was so enamored with the idea that I mistakenly made a Commando moment.
A Commando moment is when your hero has seemingly unlimited amounts of ammo and no discernible way of reloading or carrying said ammunition. A telling scene in Commando was when Arnold’s character carried a belt-fed M-60 (I think it was an M-60) with about 25 rounds clipped to it, firing away like mad and never once reloading the damned thing! He hosed about 40 bad guys while firing on full auto and never ran out of ammo, nor melted the barrel of the gun while firing constantly.
Dear DARPA: find out who made that gun.
I made that mistake when I stuck a Vulcan cannon onto the arms of the Wraith suits. I loved the idea of 20mm rounds on full auto, and actually had written that scene in — until I realized that they had no way of carrying the ammunition without being in a suit that was 30 feet high.
Crap, indeed. There was no way my suits could carry enough ammo in anything bigger than shotgun pellets in massive quantity. And since John Ringo already did the hypervelocity beads of death in his Posleen series, I was up a foul-smelling creek without a paddle.
Mistake #2: For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.
Then I started thinking about the power inside my suits. That’s a lot of energy being expended to make something that damned big and heavy viable. Then I thought about the heat output and realized that without some cooling system that was better than dunking something into an ice-cold ocean and leaving it there, my suits would melt everything within a ten meter radius around them — including the human inside them.
It takes a lot of energy to move these suits. What’s generating this energy? I had a mini-nuke plant on their suit somewhere but, the more I was thinking about it this morning, the more I realized that the plant could go critical with all the abuse these suits take. Other than powering a suit with unobtanium, I was at a loss as to explain how it works. Bah.
Mistake #3: Anything advanced enough to have a 30 foot robot with a person inside can have an automated robot instead.
Sure, the argument here can be that the reaction time (i.e., “lag”) between controller and robot but if we can have ships that move almost FTL (jumpgate tech, stolen, not sure how it works but it does) then we can have instantaneous WiFi, right? So why risk the person in the suit when we can be safely sitting at some base, away from the action, munching on some Twinkies while killing aliens?
Yeah, in that context, having people inside the Wraith suits made little sense to me either.
So now I’m starting another damned novel over, this time with simple powered armor (easier to create biorythmic armor than full battle-tank like armor). It also allows me to use other devices for labor (something’s gotta hump that ammo in) and create better scenes for when they lose an ammo train or something.
I’m not happy. This novel, outside of a few that I had written and need to edit, was the next closest thing to being finished. It was just over halfway done. It’s frustrating, writing SF, when the science doesn’t work once you think about it.
…so yeah, thanks a lot, Larry.
You jerk.
*sigh*
I need to get to work.
