If you don’t f*@% with the Culture, then what?

Well, it’s a weekend for finishing off books, apparently – I just listened to the last little bit of Surface Detail, a Culture Novel, and one that I first began reading via Audible.com nearly a year ago, in July 2011, shortly after getting back from the CSSF workshop and determined to familiarize myself with some of the masters of science fiction that I hadn’t been exposed to yet. I also got, at close to the same time:

• “More than Human”, by Theodore Sturgeon.
• “Gateway”, by Frederik Pohl.
• “Timescape”, by Gregory Benford.
• “Darwin’s Radio”, by Greg Bear.
• and, a bit later, “Childhood’s End”, by Arthur C. Clarke.

I wanted to get something by Sturgeon and Pohl because they were both selected as theme authors for the 2011 Campbell Conference in Lawrence, and all of the other titles or authors were taken from the reading list of the CSSF Intensive Institute for novels. I didn’t really finish any of them off that quickly, with the possible exception of ‘Gateway’, which I enjoyed considerably, and only got to the end of “Timescape” in February.

Overall, I enjoyed “Surface Detail”, and had fun listening to it, but I’m still not quite sure what to make of it as more than a crazy adventure among the stars. I really wasn’t sure what was going on for the first few hours’ worth of narration, and then some of the plot threads began to gather enough for me to find my bearings. I quickly felt sympathy for Lededje, was intrigued by some of Vateuil’s military derring-do, and loved to hate Veppers. At first, I despised Demeisen/’Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints’, (the former is an avatar, the latter a spaceship, but both names essentially represent a single character,) but by the end, I thoroughly enjoyed him as the sadistic asshole that he usually is.

And one of the best parts of the book were the alien civilizations that Iain M. Banks brings to life – the all-too-human Sichultia, the polite and diminutive GFCF, the herdlike conservative Pavuleans, and, of course, The Culture themselves.

Even despite tentative attempts to research the Culture online, (tentatively because I don’t really want to stumble across spoilers for other books,) I don’t really understand them. I know that they’re spacegoing, idealistic, practical, fiercely protective of their own but not generally antagonistic, and have some rather peculiar political and social structures. They have a frankly mind-boggling technological level, and some of the greatest influences from within the Culture are not the organic, mostly ‘pan-Human’ citizens, but the incredibly capable artificial intelligence ‘Minds’ which generally oversee spaceships or other artificial habitats.

Have you read any of the stories of the Culture? What did you think? If not, what’s your favorite science fiction high-tech society?

May goals update

Well, after doing National Novel Editing Month in March, and Script Frenzy + A-Z challenge in April, I went back to picking my own stretch goals in May, and I think that they’re going pretty well so far…

Back to ‘How to Revise your Novel.’ It’s taken me a little while to get back up to speed with where I left off in this Holly Lisle course, but I’ve finished off lesson 14 and done the reading for lesson 15 now. They’re both relating to timeline stuff: 14 talks about the ‘simple’ chronological timeline and the importance of getting that straight, and then 15 suggests different exercises with complex timelines to see what they can add to your book – flashforward openings, flashbacks to the beginning, backward scene-by-scene chronologies, and parallel structures where you go through each character’s timeline one by one. I’m not sure that any of those are the ticket for ‘Children’, but I want to go through the exercises and see if I can make any of them tell me something new about my story.

Drafting short stories. I’m still not quite crazy or confident enough to try ‘Story a Day in May’, but I’ve committed to writing three new shorts in May, and as of tonight I’ve finished two, including one that I submitted to the SDMB short fiction contest!

Cleaning my apartment. I need to keep on with this too, but I’ve gotten a good start – my kitchen is pretty much in good enough shape that the air conditioner guy can get some work done in there, which is very important at this time of year.

Reading and critiquing stuff. Doing fairly well. I’m all done with my slush pile responsibilities for James Gunn’s Ad Astra, until a new batch of submissions comes through. I’m keeping up with ‘two stories a week’ for Elizabeth Twist’s short story reading challenge, and – well, I’m not sure I’m going to get anything in for critters.org this week, but I’m going to do some critting before May is over!

Preparing for Kansas workshop. Some progress – I have my new passport, which was important as the old one would expire before I had to fly. I’ve sent in my registration form for the workshop session and the dorm room. Still need to – book flights, send in payment to the University, and revise the stories that I want to get workshopped.

How much have you accomplished so far this month?

The blank-page rewrite

So, I’ve been working hard today on a quick rewrite of a 5900-word science fiction story. And, just because it’s supposed to be done by tomorrow – I’m starting fresh from a blank page.

In a weird way, devoting myself to writing and science fiction for nearly every waking hour all week has convinced me that such crazy feats are possible. And, also, they’ve convinced me that this story really needs a blank-page rewrite anyway, so I might as well start that way instead of going with the superficial patches that I’ll have to pave over anyway.

I’ve learned an incredible amount about writing so far in the workshop, and the effect on my self-esteem has been indeterminate – like a quantum particle, the act of measuring how I feel about my writing seems to change it these days.

I’ve more or less caught up on my critiques – still need to do some prep-work for Monday, though that can be after tomorrow at 5pm, (the deadline for the rewrite.) I got the new chapters written for the two Roswell crossovers that I wanted to finish in June – Children of the Molecule, which is Roswell/Doctor Who, and Dragon’s Prey, the Roswell/Pern one. The third fandom story that I wanted to update in June – just wasn’t going to happen, I didn’t leave myself enough time for it, though at least I started it before I left Ontario.

And I’ve actually managed to watch some fun science fiction television – I caught two ‘Torchwood’ episodes yesterday, and watched a ‘Sarah Jane Adventure’ and an episode of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ in the dorm laundry room this morning, staring into my iphone while waiting out the wash and dry cycles.

Workshop critiques round 1 round-up

Well, at something like sixty-one hours since I arrived in Lawrence, I feel like I’m finally caught up and into the swing of things.

The short fiction group has done two afternoons of critiquing, which have been pretty interesting sessions – we’ve been taking about an hour per story, plus some side tracks, and I learned a lot about the first story that I had critiqued – especially that I had a promising theme buried in the plot that I hadn’t noticed. Four hours an afternoon doesn’t seem like that much of a time investment, but really, the organized activities part of the day so far seems to have gone something like:

• noon – gather for lunch and sometimes a lunch lecture
• 1pm – back from lunch, gather in the lounge for critiquing.
• 5:15 pm – critiques finish, discussion keeps on going.
• 5:30 pm – leave the lounge to quickly check email and a few other things online
• 6 pm – gather for dinner downtown
• 8:30 pm (approx) – back to campus after dinner.

And when you add the time that I’ve been putting in reading other people’s stories and figuring out what I want to say about them in my critiques… it definitely takes up a lot of the day, not to mention just sitting and talking with other writers.

I’m probably going to blow off the group dinner tonight, just because I’m not a fan of mexican, so probably that’ll mean a bit more time to myself to write this evening. I’ve almost got my critiques ready for today, and it’s only 10am, so that’s great. Aliens on Pern, here I come!

But I’ll tell a bit more about the critiquing process first. Everybody takes turns going clockwise from the person who wrote the story – there’s no reading out loud, since everybody’s had the stories to read by themselves – and can say whatever they like, as long as it’s constructive, though a lot of people have adopted a kind of ‘good news, bad news’ approach, starting with things they like, then the things that they think would improve the story, and maybe finishing off with one more nice compliment. Chris M, who runs the workshop, always goes last, and often takes a tangent to give us all some advice or present a resource like a list of senses to try appealing to in your writing.

The first day, I just came up with some synopses, (which I didn’t share with the group,) and my likes and issues list. Since then, I’ve actually been working off my printouts, mostly because I want some excuse to actually hand them back to the writers and not have to hang onto them, so they’ re mostly more filled with my reader reactions than copy-editing points, and anything that qualifies for the likes and issues list, I retype into a new file.

My second story is up today – I hope it goes pretty well. This one, I have slightly higher hopes in than the first day’s story, so it might be a bit harder to take if the criticisms are serious, but I think I just need to keep in mind that everything is usable, and nobody’s really trying to tell me off or put me down, just to help.

The (first!) Kansas stories binder.

Well, it’s less than 36 hours before I leave to go to Kansas, now.

As I may have mentioned, all of the participants have sent out their 3 stories to be workshopped now, and the workshop leader, Chris M, suggested that we should have printed them all out and bring the printouts with us. Earlier this week, I started to think about such little practical questions as ‘Do I have enough printer paper? What will I take all these printouts to Kansas in?’ So I stopped at Walmart when doing an after-work practice driving session with my brother on Wednesday, and picked up:

1. a 500 pack of laser and copier paper.
2. a 1 inch 3-ring binder.
3. a new 3-hole puncher.
4. some binder dividers.

I got most of the stories printed out Wednesday evening and Thursday morning, but I didn’t begin to punch the holes or put them into the binder until tonight, and I quickly realized that the one binder wasn’t going to be enough. I’ve punched out and inserted 245 pages by my count, but the binder’s nearly full, and the 24 stories in all total 475 pages.

I do want to get everything into two binders if I can, especially since the schedule given is that half of us will get their stories critiqued on any given afternoon, in the same split, so I can have one binder for the on-days and one for the off-days. It actually looks like my best strategy will be to get a larger binder, (an inch and a half?) for the group that I’ve started on, since that one has some longer-winded scribes, and keep the one-inch binder for the other side.

It’s starting to settle in on me just how much writing we’re going to be going through, and it’s something very different than I’m used to organizing at one time. I’ve grown accustomed to the idea of running off half a dozen or more copies of my own story to take to one of the critique groups here in town, but Kansas CSSF is obviously a very different kind of thing.

So, I’d better get myself to the store early tomorrow.

Kansas stories have been sent in!

So, yesterday afternoon I emailed off three stories to the other student writers for the CSSF workshop in Kansas. It was fun and a little giddy stuff, finishing my rewrite of Harry and Mars, and going over my critique tracking spreadsheets for both Landing and Harry.

The third story, ‘Survey’, on the other hand, I just dug up the most recent draft from last September, checked to make sure that the formatting looked good, and sent it off. It’ll be interesting to see if anybody notices a different between that story and the ones that I’ve put more work into revising recently.

This evening, I booked a town car service to take me from the Kansas City airport to the University in Lawrence. I’m flying in fairly late in the afternoon, none of the shuttle schedules look like a good fit, and I don’t want to have to wait around the airport, so I’ll be making the trip in affluent style. Woot!

‘Harry and Mars’ rewrite update

Big thanks to everybody who left encouraging comments last week when I told you about my plans to do a third draft on ‘Harry and Mars’. It really helps to get such supportive thoughts from total strangers!

So – I started the rewrite from scratch last Saturday, and now I’m up to 5824 words, and I think that the climax has just passed. To my surprise, it’s all new stuff, too, I never got to a point where I thought, “okay, here’s where this bit from the first draft fits in” and copy/pasted it. I definitely had a lot of the same general scene ideas – the engineer finds out about the leaking tank, the captain issues orders to everybody, Harry and the engineer bond and talk about childhood fears, the fire in the reduction lab, Harry trying to get out the airlock – but I had different things I wanted to get out of each passage now.

I’ve also done some interesting character work, I think – I was wanting to establish the crew as being really multinational, and that didn’t come through on the last draft, so I started looking at all the countries who’ve had space programs, no matter how small, and looked around coming up with really distinctive names that obviously signify a nationality or ethnicity – and those names have informed the secondary characters and helped me flesh them out as individuals, in an odd way.

I feel a bit like I’ve been doing ‘discovery writing’ with this draft; I haven’t been trying to come up with a polished product, just get some good stuff in there, especially since I know that the Kansas crew will be able to help me figure out what works and what doesn’t. But I like the story more at this point than I thought I might.

Which is good, because there’s about five days left to finish and polish it before sending it out to my fellow CSSF workshoppers – not to mention any last changes I want to make to the Landing. Tic-toc!

Doing another big rewrite

I want to rewrite ‘Harry and Mars’ by June 14th, so that I can incorporate most of the notes I got from critters.org before submitting it for the Kansas workshop. (I’m also planning to do a few more revisions to ‘The Landing’ in the same timeframe.)

Unfortunately, it looks like most of the opinions I got from critters.org are suggesting that the story has some good potential, but some serious issues. When I pull up the appropriate tab of my ‘tracking spreadsheet’, some of the first entries for Harry and Mars include:

• Flesh out the characterization of all characters (except Harry)
• Explain the roots and the progressions of the phobia better. The reader has to believe in it!
• Plot relies on unlikely personal issues.
• ‘Show, don’t tell’ about Harry in particular
• Write with better style
• Explore the theme of hopelessness more?
• The ending is pointless

Now, to be fair, I sorted the list for items that I felt would require a lot of work to get these ones to the top, but still, there weren’t a lot of ‘quick wins’ and easy changes that I thought would improve the story much.

Like the title character in the story, I do feel a bit as if I’m on the edge of giving into despair and fear. I’ve already done a fairly substantial rewrite on my first draft, and despite the potential that I and other people have seen, I’m not entirely sure if there’s a great story in here that I can tell, or that I really want to tell. Still, I haven’t given up, and I’m going to give it one more try in the next two weeks. Going over all the points from that list, I’ve actually just had an interesting idea for reworking the story – getting rid of Charlie as the POV character, beginning the story with Harry attempting suicide and being stopped, and having three supporting characters each interview her to try and find out why she did it – the doctor, the captain, and Charlie, the best friend.

As tempting as it was to work in the ‘phobia of Phobos’ bit, I think that that was leading me astray too. My first draft wasn’t about a phobia, but about a crewmember on a space flight giving into depression and despair in the midst of a crisis, and I think that may be the better way to go after all. The question of why she suffered from that depression, and how no-one had spotted it earlier, can be the central question that I explore.

Wish me luck!

 

Making travel plans

I’ve been doing a lot of travel planning over the past few weeks, and the anticipation can be almost as much fun as the actual travelling. (It can also be a bit frustrating.)

• There’s the big trip, of course, to Lawrence, Kansas for the CSSF workshop, last week of June and first week of July.
• Dragon*Con 2011, Labor day weekend in Atlanta!
• Fan Expo 2011, the week before in Toronto. Going up to Toronto for a day or an evening doesn’t really count as a trip on the same level as flying to the states, but when I’m booking a hotel room in the city for the weekend, then I tend to count it.
• And, I’ve just made the arrangements to go back to San Francisco in November, to attend the Night of Writing Dangerously for my third straight year!

I’m planning to go to Polaris as well, wouldn’t miss my chance to go and see Adam Baldwin, but haven’t actually booked the ticket or the hotel yet. I’ll need to do that soon, as the online ticket sales deadline is in just a few days.

And I think that when all of that is done, I’ll still have some vacation time left, because my boss confirmed that I qualify for four weeks off this year. Where else should I go – any ideas?

May goals update! Much accomplished!

So, checking in on my list of creative to-do items for May, I feel like I’ve really done very well:

• Finished all three fanfic chapters I wanted to write. The new installment of “Un-brotherly love’ is a little shorter than I had planned, but it came to a good chapter break point.
• I added four titles to my master fanfic tracker spreadsheet, which was enough to figure out that it wasn’t all that hard.
• I submitted four stories for magazine publication!
• I’ve finished reading and critiquing a novel manuscript from critters.org
• I’ve visited a lot of cool blogs.
• I had a great time with the Storywonk workshop, and posted all of the ‘homework assignments’ on the private forum.
• I’ve completed tracking spreadsheets for all of the critters comments I got for ‘The Landing’ and ‘Harry and Mars’

This, in addition to other cool but unplanned stuff like getting into the CSSF workshop, and getting the air conditioner repaired.

I’ve started on the list of June goals to accomplish, as follows: