xxxix - Day 10 - What are some really weird situations your characters have been in?

And we are back with our regularly scheduled programme.  It hasn't been a terribly productive week, well, at least not for writing.  Final preparations for a kitchen renovation ate up the early part of last week, and then repairing my laptop and re-installing all the software made short work of what was left.  I think I'm mostly done, so hopefully the cart stays upright from now on.

This week we have another hard question. The way the question is written immediately brought to mind the sort of gimmicky and contrived stories teenagers write. I shy away from creating deliberately weird situations. Weirdness should serve the purpose of the story, rather than being the basis for the story. If not constructed carefully, it ceases to be about character development or progression, veering instead into a series of unconnected, implausible accidents.

I have to admit my gauge for this kind of thing isn't the same as most people I've known. Being a fan of science fiction doesn't help, either. Would meeting a race of sentient glass that communicates musically (by manipulating the frequency, harmonic content, and amplitude of a series of tones) be considered weird in the context of a science fiction story? By definition the genre pushes beyond human experience and so a baseline weird exists every time you set out to write that kind of story.

In another of my stories, the protagonist refines a theory proposed by his parents and travels back in time. Unfortunately on his first "successful" attempt, he manages to rewrite his family history, which leads to him jumping through time, having to ensure successive generations of his ancestors are introduced to each other. Kind of a tongue-in-cheek Quantum Leap meets Back to the Future thing.

Interlude

This week I'm going to bring you something a little different. The last four days have been interesting in a potentially pivotal sort of way, and I felt it was worthwhile to record the events for posterity. We'll resume the usual Q&A meme next week.

It all started about three weeks ago. In the last few days of May I put the "final" touches (after all, "Art is never finished, only abandoned" according to Leonardo Da Vinci) on a story I intended to submit for publication. It's the first story, as far as I can recall, that I've ever submitted with the end goal of getting paid for it. My first choice has an electronic submissions system, so on the evening of June 1st, I submitted my words to the ether and began the excruciating process of waiting for a reply.

It was excruciating. Some of the anxiety was expected: it was my first attempt, and I'm not good at waiting in this kind of circumstance. The projected 4-8 weeks turnaround seemed like an eternity when all I wanted was an answer. But I was completely unprepared for the extent of my vulnerability. Imagine, if you will, a feeling like when you skin your knee. Only it's inside your head, and it's formed around your entire psyche.

As an aside to any of my younger readers: when you're making a wager, make sure the payout for winning is worth the pain you'll endure in earning it. My pride got the better of me and when my wife bet I couldn't go two weeks without checking the online tracking offered by the publisher, I accepted the challenge without bothering to work out any of the important stuff, like, you know, stakes. I can't in clear conscience say it would have been better had I been able to track the submission through the system. I can say it was hard not to be able to.

At any rate, I won the bet. Well, mostly.

They rejected the story on the 13th day, which was this past Thursday. Deep down I knew I had no right to expect them to take my first submission, and I didn't. What I was aiming for was a "rejection-plus". The usual form letter with a few words of constructive critique/encouragement straight from the editor's desk. I didn't get that either. Why? Who knows? From what I've read the process of getting published is like trying to sink baskets from beyond the 3-point line while blindfolded. Practice as much as you can to refine your technique, take your shot, and then hope for the best.

Meanwhile, there was a simmering unrest within the postal service. Contract negotiations hadn't gone well and twenty four hours after I lobbed my creation into the unknown, the union started rolling strikes across the country. Twelve days later - two days before the rejection e-mail - the service would lock out its workers, shutting down all mail services.

This is important because the only other markets I know for my story don't accept electronic submissions yet. Under normal circumstances, I would print the story, bundle it into an envelope and ship it to its next destination. That's hard without a postal service. I suppose I could use a courier service, but that seems like overkill, especially for a complete unknown like me.

So, with Plan A on hold until the strike is over, Plan B is to prep a second story for submission. The idea was that I would go home that night and after doing some research, to see if I could dig up clues to help my second submission's prospects, I'd plow into my second tale.

Can you guess what happened next? It's been well telegraphed, I think. You don't know the details, of course, but it will come as no surprise that my hard drive died on me. Approximately 30 seconds into my online recon, the screen froze in a way I've never seen. After a few failed reboots and a smartphone-enabled Google search, I was ready to eulogize my dearly departed technology. It wasn't exactly a child-friendly tribute. So much for Plan B.

As another aside to my younger readers: when prompted to make recovery disks for a proprietary computer system, DO IT. I don't have any media with which to re-install an operating system on the new drive I have to buy. The postal strike means I can't expect to receive the disks the manufacturer will kindly ship me for the bargain price of an arm (no leg) any time soon. Had I taken just an hour a year ago, I'd have a working machine this evening. As it stands, I'm hoping the 6+ year old backup PC I have doesn't blow its last circuit.

The net result of my misadventures was that my primary time sink, for either distraction or productivity, was gone. I was going to need alternative activities. Last minute coordination for the kitchen renovations my wife and I are having done took up a good part of the weekend.

Fortunately, my lovely wife noticed a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" - which I'd mentioned wanting to read a few months ago - in one of the stores we were zipping through. That took care of the remainder of my free time this weekend. It's an interesting read. I won't go into any detail here, but I recommend it to anyone interested in a study of the mechanics of success.

Right about now you're probably wondering why I've gone to all this trouble to set up the book. (If you weren't, you definitely are now!) Naturally, as I was reading, I applied the concepts to my own experience. A pretty clear picture formed: I've got the other bases covered to varying degrees, the only thing I'm missing is the hours.

So I'm going to undertake an experiment. Gladwell postulates that it takes 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to achieve mastery in a discipline.

2 down. 9,998 to go.

xxxviii - Day 09 - What's your favourite genre to write? To read?

Let me answer the second question first.

I've always been a big fan of "speculative fiction". For those who aren't up on current genre definitions, that's what has become of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Sometime in the 90s, they were merged into one all-encompassing genre along with not-quite-Earth stories like "magicians in NYC" or "what if the Nazis won WWII?"

I like these stories because custom-building a setting allows the author to really focus on and highlight specific facets of the human condition. All the while the (would-be) fearless explorer/reader gets to go on safari in exotic locations. I would absolutely love to walk the surface of another planet and science fiction is the closest I'll ever get to that.

In a not distant second, I also like mysteries and thrillers. In smaller doses. And by smaller doses I mean short stories if they're set in the "real world", or if woven into exotic and usually imaginary settings in the case of a novel.

As to which genre is my favourite to write, there are two ways I could interpret that: What genre are you most comfortable writing? Or, what genre would you like to write the most?

At this stage I'm more comfortable writing mysteries. I think this is primarily because writing about stories set "in the real world" allows me to focus more on storytelling and characterization.  The setting's background details can be researched rather than invented. I also quite enjoy the logic-problem feel of researching and constructing a mystery.

When I'm ready, after having had a chance to practice the fundamentals on stories set in the here & now, I'll try to expand my skill set and incorporate more speculative into my fiction. Extrapolation is the name of the game here. Every unknown needs to be justified to a greater or lesser degree, to be made believable. Oftentimes the settings themselves play important roles and need to be fleshed out with the same care that's dedicated to the main characters. 

xxxvii - Day 07 - Do you listen to music when you write? What kind? How do you relate music to your writing?

Yes, but not always. Generally speaking, the earlier in the process and the less solid my ideas for whatever I'm writing, the more likely it is that I'll be listening to something while I write.

In the early, purely creative stages of writing, chances are good that I'll play something that mirrors the feel of the scene/section I'm trying to write. I'm not sure if I'm actually projecting what I feel onto the page, but at the very least, I find having the music primes me to write the kind of scenes I want to be writing. So, the writing may not capture my frame of mind, but I'm in the right frame of mind to write. With the amount of press given to vanquishing The Blank Page, I figure any strategy that helps me put down words is a good strategy.

As I move along in the process, the less likely I am to press play, until, sometime before final edits are underway, I'm not listening to anything other than the sound of my fingers on the keyboard. Music isn't a distraction at that point, but I'm working other parts of my brain, more careful and considered parts, having sound on in the background would be at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction. Chances are, I haven't even thought about it in the midst of tweaking sentence structure and fine-tuning the details.