nancyfulda

Books for Breast Cancer Reaearch

2009-06-26T08:50:04Z

Author and all-around cool guy James Maxey is supporting breast cancer research by giving free books to anyone who donates to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

James says: I've set up a modest goal of raising $300 through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you'd pay for the book on Amazon. However, I'll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it's just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who's with me?

The books are top-quality fiction, and well worth reading. Learn how to get one here.

I know too many people

2009-06-25T17:59:16Z

My brain was not designed to keep track of the inhabitants of five online communities; three real-life communities; business contacts; magazine staffs; writing group buddies and their careers, etc. and so forth.

I have a run-of-the-mill, non-enhanced brain with old fashioned biological synapses. It is optimized for a small village with two or three hundred people at the most, all of whom are somehow related to each other. I have a hard time living in a distributed society.

This is not a complaint, precisely. (Although I may well use it as an excuse for forgetting your birthday, your book release day, or various other socially significant data.) However, when AnthologyBuilder is running on its own momentum, when the current SFWA project is done, when all the urgent reasons for staying in touch with people and Getting Things Done are past, I'll be very tempted to retreat to a single, real-world writers' group with about five members and stay there for several years.

(pause for thought)

Except then I'd miss everybody...

SFWA Information Center -- Wish List

2009-06-15T21:05:36Z

As part of my work on the SFWA website, I'm overseeing an Information Center with handy information for writers of several skill levels. You know: advice for new writers, contract advice, writing tips, market listings, agent etiquette and suchlike.

I figure it makes sense to ask some, you know... actual writers what they'd like to see in those pages. The IC will be accessible to the public, so this question applies to SFWA members as well as to those who aren't:

If you dropped by the SFWA Information Center, what information would you most likely be looking for?

Three Things Every Aspiring Writer Should Know

2009-06-12T20:17:16Z

1. Do Not Do This For the Money

You probably know this already, but let's just be clear: very few people get rich writing fiction. Most novelists never earn enough to quit their day jobs. In fact, many first-time novelists never manage to sell a second book. If you're looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, this isn't it.

Which is not to say you shouldn't aspire to quit your day job. Heck, I aspire to write a masterpiece and become the next J. K. Rowling. Who wouldn't want to earn their money doing something they love? Just don't count on it, that's all I'm saying.

And don't let the desire to earn money drown out the little muse that started you writing in the first place. Write smart, yes. Learn the markets, learn the business, learn how to make money: do all those things. But don't lose sight of your muse in the process. If you do, writing will become just another day job, and honestly: there are day jobs that pay far better.

2. Your Stories are not Babies; They're Guinea Pigs

This is a difficult thing for new writers to learn. We pour blood and sweat and tears into our manuscripts, and then our critique group comes along and tells us they're trash and need completely rewritten.

(If you're a new writer, and your critique group doesn't tell you this, you probably need a new critique group. It's great to hear that you write brilliantly, but you need critiquers who can spot the flaws in your manuscript and help you fix them.)

Now I'm going to tell you a secret: About half of all feedback you will receive in critique groups is utterly worthless. It won't help you improve the story. In fact, if you follow it, it will completely destroy the story you were trying to create.

Here's the catch: You will not learn how to recognize which half of the critique feedback is junk without mangling a few stories in the process. Like a child learning to ride a bicycle, you have to wobble and fall a few times before you know how to counterbalance properly.

If you love your stories too much to tamper with them, you will never learn to tamper properly. My advice is to dive in with the shears and a pruning hook and really gut the thing. What you end up with might be worse than what you started with, that's true. But it's not like you have to delete the original version, and anyway, the single greatest benefit of critiquer feedback comes when you're writing the next story.

3. There is No Secret Ingredient

There's no magic formula that's going to make all your manuscripts brilliant from now on. It's not just about characterization, or plotting, or prose style, or whether you write in first or in third person. It's also not about whether you write on recycled paper with a ballpoint pen or in a darkened room with your screen angled North-by-Northwest. And it's certainly not about convincing everyone else that what happens to work for you is what they should be doing as well.

There is not secret ingredient.

I'm saying this because it is a common mishap among new writers to learn something fabulous that completely revolutionizes their writing, and to consequently assume that if everyone else would just apply the same technique, their writing would be revolutionized, too.

Well, maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. The problem with those pesky Rules of Writing people are so fond of quoting in online critiques is that writing is a complex, fluid, and very personal thing. Space Opera requires a different style of expression than Magic Realism. Descriptive techniques that bring a Sword and Sorcery novella to life would utterly evicerate an Interstitial story. Just because we all put words on the page doesn't mean we're doing anything remotely like the same thing.

Writing is about trial and error. It's about finding what works for you and helping other people to do the same. It's about murdering your darlings and waking up in the morning to discover that they were really only guinea pigs anyway. And it's about having fun.

So go have fun, folks. And don't worry that you haven't found the secret ingredient for that yet. There isn't one.

THIS, folks, is how you market a book.

2009-06-10T09:09:02Z

Jay Lake's novel Green came out yesterday and I spotted this banner on several blogs:

This is an example of brilliant marketing. The animation grabs my attention and the text immediately makes me want to read the book -- even though I know practically nothing about it.

As authors, it's sometimes hard to restrain ourselves from revealing everything about our magnum opus on the assumption that the more people know, the more interested they'll be. It doesn't really work that way. Excessive babble turns off potential buyers in the same way an infodump turns off readers. It's too much detail, too concentrated, coming at them at a time when they'd rather be thinking about something else.

So here's the take home lesson for the day: There's a reason why elevator pitches are only thirty seconds long. All you have to do is intrigue someone enough to make them take a closer look.

Oh, and go buy a copy of Green.

Bring Your Son to Work Day (a.k.a. Alex Builds an Anthology)

2009-06-09T20:41:05Z

So my five-year-old's always asking me what I do for work. I usually brush him off with a half-hearted answer because, really, how interesting is abstract computer stuff to a child? Yesterday he asked the same question, and I had a moment of inspiration.

"I build a web site that makes books," I said, and pulled him up on my lap. "Here, I'll show you." AnthologyBuilder has a shiny new site design, so there were bright colors to look at as I clicked into the AB library. "See, these are all books that people made here."

Alex's eyes started to glow. "Can I buy one? I want that one." He pointed to a book with an astronaut on the cover.

"We can do better than that," I said, and I showed him how to build an anthology from scratch.

Alex switched from the astronaut cover to a picture of a comet blazing through outer space. He gleefully selected from the stories I indicated were pre-approved by Mommy, including one with the evocative title Grandma Disappears. Then he asked for one about a dragon and his treasure, so we added Accounting for Dragons.

Alex listened to me read the online previews for each story and decreed that we must buy it Right Now. So in a few weeks, this book will be showing up on our doorstep.

And that, Alex, is what Mommy does for work.

Cover Artist Nails It Again

2009-06-06T17:01:03Z

Oh. My. Gosh.
You guys have got to see this.

That picture? That's the cover art for In the Halls of the Sky-Palace in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe. And it's exactly the way I imagined it.

Well, no, if you want me to be perfectly honest, it's better. It's the way I would have imagined the Sky-Palace if I had an imagination as vibrant as Karl Nordman's.

People are the only thing that keeps getting more complicated

2009-05-27T08:11:06Z

You know, people are the only topic that seems more complicated and more difficult the more I learning about it.

Programming languages: No problem. They're confusing and make no sense at first, but once you know all the rules, implementing them is a jiffy.

Dance steps: No problem. Your body doesn't want to go along at first, but once you've banged it through your muscles enough times, it almost comes on its own.

People: Big problem. The more you learn about people the more you realize that every person is his or her own world, and everything you say is going to be filtered through that world-view, and unless you are very familiar with the person in question, your statement may very possibly be taken in a different way than you intended. Add that to the infuriating fact that people don't hold still, that the things your child or friend or whoever liked yesterday are not guaranteed to be the same things she likes today, and I begin to understand why so many wise sages preferred to live on a mountaintop away from all the complexity.

...Aaaaaaand I'm trying real hard to come up with a nifty writing-related analogy to tie this observation into, but I'm afraid you're all out of luck.

All I know is, dealing with people was much easier when I was a child and interactions consisted of walking up and saying, "May I have a lollipop?"

Last Impressions

2009-05-22T12:51:37Z

Mike Resnick's got a nice article about Last Impressions in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe. Resnick's point is a valuable one for authors, and can be summed up as "Don't give up on your story just because everyone else has". But it's actually the title of the article that caught my attention.

In this world, we talk a lot about first impressions. Career trainers emphasize how important they are in job interviews. Agents and editors talk about how critical the first few pages or chapters of a manuscript are. High-profile authors discuss stategies for making a splash at conventions.

In all of the chatter about looking good, getting attention, and making the most of the first few seconds it's easy to forget that a first impression is worthless if you don't have something solid to follow it up with.

Have you ever dated someone who seemed fantastic at first glance, but became less and less interesting the longer you talked to them?

Ever seen a movie that looked great in the previews and turned out to be a total flop?

When Jim Baen died, what astounded me most wasn't the number of people who wrote online eulogies, but the consistency of those eulogies. Jim Baen, they said, was an incredibly kind person. He helped people. He spoke to everyone, from first-time conventioners to top-selling authors, with respect and consideration. Now that's a legacy if ever I heard one.

I still think first impressions are important, don't get me wrong. But Mike's article reminded me that it's not worth scrambling to make a good first impression if you pollute your lasting impression in the process. Be a good person first, and a flashy person second.

Soul Blindness

2009-05-15T08:47:45Z

There is a medical condition called visual agnosia (sometimes also called Soul Blindness) in which the patient can see objects and describe them in great detail, but cannot identify them.

The patient might be looking at a clock, for example, and be able to report that it is circular, with numbers along the rim, but cannot say what it is. But if you hold it next to his ear and let him hear it ticking, he'll say, "Oh, it's a clock."

I sometimes feel that my son has a kind of emotional agnosia. He can take a toy from a child, and know that the child is crying, but not really understand that he caused it. He can hit another child with a stick and say, "Hey, this is fun!" (He means that it's fun to play with the stick, but you can see how this leads to misunderstandings. The fact that a child is left crying in his wake doesn't really register.)

It's not that Alex doesn't have feelings or doesn't care about other people's. He shows incredible tenderness towards his baby sister. He immediately returns toys when I say, "Look, that child is crying. He's sad because his toy was taken away." But his brain doesn't seem able to make the connection on its own. He needs someone to hilight the relevant points of the situation and help his neurons find an alternate route to the conclusions everyone else jumps to so effortlessly.

Interview on Bibliophile Stalker

2009-05-07T07:31:35Z

For those who haven't seen it yet, Charles Tan interviewed me on Bibliophile Stalker.

Charles is a good interviewer. He's coaxed out some of the most frank and (IMO) most useful comments of any interview I've done. It's all in how you ask the questions, I guess.

Intervew Excerpt:

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview! First off, how did you first get interested in speculative fiction?

I'm not sure speculative fiction is something you get interested in so much as something you discover you're obsessed with. I've been reading science fiction and fantasy for just about as long as I've been reading anything at all.

Who were your favorite authors back then or what were some of your favorite books? How about now?

The series I remember most vividly is ElfQuest, by Wendy and Rchard Pini. My older sister had borrowed Book I from a friend, and I guess I knew better than to ask her permission to read it because I snuck it away from her side while she was watching tv... (read more)

Genetic Foreigners

2009-05-04T09:45:09Z

A few months ago I remarked to my sister that the autistic spectrum, ADHD, and related phenomena seem to be far more prevalent in America than in Germany. I wondered aloud whether there were actually more cases in the US or whether US professionals were just more likely to make the diagnosis.

Sandra's response was: "Well, when you think about who first colonized America, it was the people who couldn't sit still."

Holy, schmacoley, she's right. America's colonists (and in subsequent decades, immigrants) were people willing to leave their homes and relatives half a world behind them. They were often political refugees who refused to conform to the accepted tenets of their societies. They stepped way beyond most people's social and emotional comfort zones. In short, they shared a lot of tendencies with today's ADHD and high-functioning autistic children.

That conversation was the first time I realized that culture shock might go far deeper than just the way you were raised; that it might be possible to feel out of place in a society, not just because you look different or act differently than those around you, but because your thought processes are fundamentally different than theirs.

Because I'm a fiction writer, my next thought after that was: "There's a story in this concept. No, there are ten thousand stories in this concept!" And my brain began merrily constructing spacefaring societies with unique personality traits, and the genetic foreigners who might live among them.

The Princess and the Businessman

2009-04-10T11:22:51Z

One of the fun things about raising children is watching their conception of the world develop. There's nothing like observing a child to make you realize how many assumptions we make daily, and how poorly some of them may reflect the true state of reality.

Aubrey got her first princess dress for Christmas and within a day was doing an unintended impression of Princess Leia, chasing around in skirts and hair ribbons, ducking out from behind doors and shooting at her brother with a fake Stormtrooper blaster.

That was the beginning of the Princess phase, and as yet it has not ended. Aubrey transforms to and from her Princess state every time she changes her clothes. This transformation is absolute. She cannot be a princess without a dress, and she is no longer Aubrey while wearing a dress. Woah unto those who mistakenly call her 'Aubrey' while she is wearing princess attire.

Alex, for his part, has set up shop in his bedroom, literally. Everything in his room is for sale (except his prized business card collection), and he is planning to earn far more money that way than by doing chores for Mommy.

He originally wanted to rent his toys out to people who came in his room. When I pointed out that we don't usually charge money from our friends for using our stuff, he said, "It's ok, I'll just sell my toys to Aubrey. She's not a friend. And if I sell them to her, I know the toys will still be in the house."

So far, Alex has sold a bath towel to Daddy and a bright yellow construction hat to Aubrey. (She subsequently gave it back to him, but since Alex's store has a firm 'no exchanges, no refunds' policy, he kept the ten cents.) He has earned 30 cents and considers his project wildly successful.

Writing Excuses #26

2009-04-09T09:49:01Z

...in which Nancy steps onto a huge conversational landmine and is graciously forgiven.

In this episode, I also managed to give myself Jackie's job. I called myself AnthologyBuilder's managing editor when I'm actually its founder. ::thwocks head to shake the loose screws back into position::

Seriously, though, it's a cool episode, with some interesting thoughts from Brandon and Howard about e-readers, digital publishing, and the free content model.

Writing Excuses, Episode 25

2009-03-30T19:53:00Z

...in which we discover that Nancy is far less humorous than some of her more famous relatives.

Artists Rock

2009-02-24T00:34:39Z

My story "Ghosts Chimes" is featured in this week's Monday Fiction. I've always loved this story, but you know, it wasn't the story that made my heart glow when I flipped through the blog entry.

It was the artwork.

B.C. Hailes has perfectly captured the mood of this piece, from Alicia's timid entrapment to her mother's sugar-coated manipulations. I am awed that an artist took the time to render my characters in such lovely detail and, truth be told, managed to portray them far more perfectly than I did.

Long live the artists!

Job Interviews

2009-02-22T12:05:44Z

Last week I spent several hours on the phone interviewing potential managing editors for AnthologyBuilder.

This was my first time being on the hiring end of a job interview. Oddly, I found it just as stressful as being an applicant, if not more so. I spent a lot of time rehearsing which questions to ask, how to sound natural and friendly, and wondering what I needed to look for to ensure a good working relationship. I got a serious case of the jitters.

Sooooooo... the next time you're headed into an intimidating job interview, remember: they might be more scared of you than you are of them!

Things to remember when traveling internationally with small children:

2009-02-20T03:25:30Z

(1) Given the choice between a 14-hour flight with one layover and a 19-hour flight with two layovers and an unexpected two-hour delay, take the 14-hour flight.

(2) Minimize carry-on baggage. Put jackets and cold-weather gear in your checked bags unless you know you'll have to travel outdoors to reach one of your connecting flights. Putting jackets on and off children is a pain, and hats and scarfs are easy to leave behind on an airplane.

(3) Keep the area near your feet clear so children can walk and play there. Children tend to not care whose laptop bag they're stepping on.

(4) Schedule layovers to coincide with the waking phase of the children's sleep cycle. Exhausted children are difficult to wake. Carrying sleeping children in addition to carry-on baggage is not fun.

(5) Do not put drinks in the children's carry-ons. There are plenty of fluids available on the plane. Empty sippy cups can easily be filled. Full sippy cups tend to leak all over the children's toys.

Perspective

2009-02-11T12:25:21Z

Yesterday my son and I managed to get into an angry, yelling, in-your-face sort of argument on the stairs. I swear, that kid is five going on fourteen.

It takes two to argue, of course. I've noticed that my part in these fights usually stems from trying to be a Good Parent rather than seeking to fulfill the needs of my child. We usually butt heads because I'm trying to achieve a quiet family dinner, or a tv-less afternoon, or one of five dozen other socially acknowledged habits of Good, Well-Brought-Up Families. My son and I have disagreements all the time, of course. They only turn into fights when I've stopped seeing my son and can only see my desire to pat myself on the back for Doing it Right.

This is a common failing in writers, too. We hack at our manuscripts with shears made of "Thou Shalt Nots" and "Murder Your Darlings", determined to Do it Right and thus create a masterpiece. But masterpieces don't come when your primary focus is on being a good author. Masterpieces come when you let the story become what it wants to be, and gently use your box of writer's tools to shape the narrative as it grows.

Ok, FaceBook is Seriously Freaking Me Out

2009-02-04T10:02:00Z

So I've been on FaceBook for about a month now. I joined mostly because I needed a FaceBook account to manage a FaceBook group started by someone else but needing my attention. (It's a long story. Don't ask.)

So begins my adventure with the Glory/Horror that is FaceBook. I looked up and friended, oh, maybe seven or eight people. But FaceBook is set up so that as soon as you friend somebody, all of their friends can SEE that you are now friends, and have the option of friending you. And once you're friends, you get daily notes on what each person's been saying/doing/what-have-you.

(Good gracious, FaceBook people, how do you possibly keep up with all this friendly babble? Heaven forbid I should ever set foot near Twitter.)

So anyway, now I've got a passel of friends and friend requests sitting in my lap. I've got old high school friends crawling out of the woodwork. Writing buddies. People from forums I stopped frequenting years ago. And -- here's the only part I find truly problematic -- a bunch of people whose names I simply don't recognize. They're probably LJ friends who I know only by pseudonym, but they MIGHT be internet stalkers or -- worse -- professional spammers. (Yes, I'm paranoid. I get it from my Dad.)

So here's the $100 question. Do I just friend everybody who friends me, assuming they're probably someone I know whose name I've just forgotten? Or do I reject and offend all those people in order to protect myself from hypothetical internet monsters?

I'm leaning towards the "friend everybody" approach, but I'm willing to be instructed on the error of my ways...

JBU is buying again

2009-02-03T11:43:11Z

Eric's working his way through the stories that have been passed up to him, so for those of you who have been (oh-so-patiently) waiting for a response, your days in limbo are (hopefully) numbered.

This probably means we'll reopen to submissions sometime within the next few months, too. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I luuuvvvvvv slushing, but I can't deny that the extra spare time has been useful.

nancyfulda @ 2009-02-03T12:30:00

2009-02-03T11:36:07Z

It's been a good week for me: one sale and one rewrite request.

I almost archived the rewrite request without realizing what it was. I skimmed across phrases like "loved this, but..." and "I can't" and assumed it was a nicely personalized reject. Fortunately, my eye caught on "If not, I completely understand" (not typical rejection letter phrasing) and I slowed down enough to read the whole thing.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is always read the whole rejection letter...

There's no such thing as a One-Size-Fits-All story

2009-01-22T11:09:09Z

One of the unique advantages of working on a project like AnthologyBuilder is that you get to read and compare stories published by top markets. The variety in style is astounding. One market's tightly-plotted thriller is another market's formulaic hack; One person's literary masterpiece is another person's self-indulgent rambling.

There are no stories that please all readers.

When I first started writing, this was a difficult concept for me to swallow. I wanted to write the story, the one so glorious that readers everywhere would fall to their knees in admiration. The one that would get glowing reviews by every member of the critique group.

Yeah, right.

Over the years, I've wasted a lot of time bending over backwards trying to please everybody, and mangling several perfectly good stories in the process.

Which leaves me wondering what to tell aspiring writers about critique groups and rewrite requests. I've seen young authors with brilliant-but-eccentric stories get hammered into conformism by critique groups that weren't the natural audience for the work. I've also seen young authors shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to listen to their critiquers and maiming their stories with the same errors over and over again.

So do you tell young writers "To thine own self be true", or do you tell them "Listen to your critique group"?

I'm not sure. But here are three things I've learned about the critiquing process:

(1) It is better to have a story that half the people love and half the people hate than to have one that everyone thinks is kind of ok.

(2) The most valuable critiques tend to be from the people who say, "I loved this! But..." Those are the people who resonate with the basic style of the story.

(3) If someone says "your characterization is off" or "I didn't find this believable" or "I didn't like this part here", you may or may not decide to agree with them. That's a matter of style and taste. But if someone says "It's boring" or "I didn't understand this part", you'd better sit up and pay attention. There's very likely a problem with your presentation.

Random Tidbits

2009-01-21T22:09:37Z

Novelists, Inc. was kind enough to invite me to their site as a guest blogger this week. It was kind of fun, although I've discovered it's a bit intimidating blogging for an audience you don't know.

I also learned that my story "Like Rain from Silver Skies" received an Honorable Mention at the Oceanview Short Story Contest.

Superstition and Lunacy

2009-01-12T11:15:54Z

Ran across an interesting quote while researching the relationship (or lack thereof) of lunar phases on human aggression:

The philosopher and poet George Santayana once observed, "Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any."

--from Bad Moon Rising: the persistent belief in lunar connections to madness