The Devil Made Me Do It

OK, so I'm skiving off work. Ever since I finished my latest novel, TimeSplash!, my productivity has been way down (although I just finished a new short story I'm very pleased with - Jim'sWorld.)

So here's a drawing of a character from TimeSplash! by way of whiling away the time. I know, I'm no Jeremy Gordon, but it's fun trying new things. This guy really does appear - looking just like this - in the story. Only my readers (Terry, Rod, Christine and Becky) know why.

Anyone else care to hazzard a guess?

Happy New Year!

Well, it was nice that the year went out on a high (see below).

As I sit here eating assorted rice crackers and drinking sump oil port, it's hard to credit that at the beginning of 2008 I was finishing off my previous novel (Time and Tyde) and wondering if I could be bothered to waste my time sending it out to publishers. Then I heard about the Orbit/QWC manuscript development retreat and thought, What the hell? I'll give it a go.

Since then I've had four stories accepted for publication, been shortlisted in one short story competition and was the winner in another. I've also finished and polished up a whole new novel (TimeSplash! - many thanks to Terry Hornby, Rod Rivers and Wifie for help with the polishing) and have it out with three agents already.

It may not sound like much, but after a lifetime of failing to get anywhere with my fiction, I'm suddenly having some real success. I blame it to a large extent on Orbit and the Queensland Writers Centre. That retreat last May really opened my eyes and got me focused on what I needed to do. Specifically, Marianne de Pierres, Kate Eltham and Bernadette Foley, put together a package of concentrated enlightenment that changed my whole approach to getting published - with incredibly good results.

I should also mention the other writers who were at the retreat with me. We refer to ourselves collectively as the Orbiteers. These guys have been a constant source of support and encouragement. It is so good to be teamed with such a group of talented writers - who just happen to be terrific human beings too. The whole experience of that retreat and the subsequent months (which also included joining the Vision Writers Group - another amazing collection of talent and wit) has changed the equation for me. I am no longer the lonely, isolated outsider I used to be. I have made inroads, I'm networking, I actually have friends who are also writers. The publishing world doesn't seem so cold and hostile as it did at the beginning of the year. I have found islands of warmth and fuzziness in that great ocean. I even have hope again that I might succeed as a writer!

Of course that might just be the sump oil port talking (or the rice crackers - hard to tell). Being an anal, scientific type, I did my accounts for the year, to see just what my success amounted to. On the one hand, I got paid for a couple of things. On the other I forked out money for retreats, conferences, memberships, books, etc.. The balance was a loss of nearly $600 for the year. Not as bad as it could be but definitely a reminder (as if one were needed!) that I still have a very long way to go.

Well, come on 2009! I've got a lot to do and I'm counting on you for support.

Happy New Year everybody!

Manuscript Brokers Wanted

Agents are brokers. They are the middlepersons who sit between writers and publishers and make the connections between the needs of each group. Trouble is, agents are in short supply.

What we now need is a new kind of broker: one who will sit between agents and writers and make those connections.

I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, I'm looking for an agent. I've just finished my latest novel, TimeSplash! and I'd like to see it published.* Trawling through agents' websites, one by one, trying to understand what genres they like to work in, whether they're accepting new clients, how they like to be queried, and so on, is only part of the work involved. I'm also working my way through authors of similar material, trying to find out who their agents are. None of this is easy. All of it is time-consuming and tedious. The yearbooks for writers that list agents and their preferences are helpful and take a lot of the pain out of the initial stages of the work, but you need one per territory (so, for me, at least Australia, America and the UK) and the printed ones are at least a year out of date already.

Secondly, I just read a blog posting by Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management, telling the world that she wants people to send her queries right now so she can read them over Christmas. Wow! If only I wrote crime fiction! This is the kind of service agents should be providing - both to writers and to publishers. It got me thinking just how much easier and more efficient finding an agent could be if they were all willing to let the world know when they were open to new queries.

Of course, even if they were all as proactive as Janet, one would still have to subscribe to the blogs of every agent in your genre. But it would be a start.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if I could just tell someone what kind of agent I needed and they would then line them up for me? Or if there was a 'clearing house' online where I could tick a few checkboxes to describe my book and up would come a list of a dozen agents around the world, actively seeking for manuscripts of that type? Surely there would be money to be made by someone in starting up an electronic marketplace like this?

On the other hand, even Janet Reid isn't perfect. Consider this post about 'surrogate writers' which basically says she'll dump any query that doesn't come directly from the writer. Makes it kind of hard for the new middlepeople to get into the market if agents don't like hearing from them. But then Janet wasn't talking about my new breed of broker (meta-agents? super-agents?). She was talking about writers who get their mums to send in a query for them! I just hope that, when manuscript brokers start to appear, her email filters won't search for phrases like 'I'm writing on behalf of...' and file their correspondence under 'Junk'.

Meanwhile...

*For any agents reading this, TimeSplash! is a sci-fi thriller, set about forty years in the future and deals with the struggles of two young people trying to prevent a very singular terrorist attack on London. He's doing it because he's a nice guy who just got dragged into it. She's doing it because she has a personal vendetta agianst the terrorist.

Limbering Up

There ought to be some kind of limbering-up exercise a writer can do. Joggers pose around in the streets trying to pull their feet off, musicians play scales and arpeggios, actors pull faces and make strange noises. What can a writer do? Compose haiku? Write out the alphabet?

I'm about to write the very last scene of my new novel TimeSplash! It's a tender scene that puts the final, delicate touch to a blossoming relationship, but it has also to tie off a number of lose ends from various plotlines, and I'd like it to end on a light, humorous note. I have the scene in my head but not the actual words. I now need to put it down on paper in all its subtlety - and I have performance anxiety.

Writing, for all that I do it in my quiet office on an isolated mountaintop, is in many ways a public performance. Just as a pianist on a stage must get every note right and give the performance the full emotional intensity the piece demands, so must the writer pull off a virtuoso performance with everything he writes. Some pieces are harder than others, some require more technical skill, some more emotional engagement, but every piece must be performed as well as it can be. The goal is always to be perfect, flawless, magnificent, to leave the audience enraptured.

So here I go with that daunting, final scene.

Wish me luck.


(The picture is 'Warming Up' by John Asaro.)

The Tyranny of Numbers

One of the things I'm doing with my new novel (TimeSplash!) is setting myself a daily word-count target. It's something I haven't tried before and it is very revealing.

I actually write very slowly and part of the reason for that is that I hate editing. The very thought of NaNoWrImO (or however it's capitalised) makes me shudder. The idea of having to face 50,000 words of badly written sentences in a poorly-structured rats' nest (which is what I'd end up with) is just unthinkable. I like to plan ahead, get the whole structure in my mind, spend hours mulling over each scene before I write it and then make each sentence I write as good as I can make it as I write it. I also do a lot of detailed research while I'm writing (I have a fetish for accuracy which means I need to know lots about every little thing I casually mention in passing!) I still have to go back, read through what I've done, edit and rework, even move large chunks around - but not very much. The time I put in up front saves a lot of much more difficult and tedious work at the end. So it is difficult to decide just how many words a day I should write.

In the end, I decided that a thousand words a day should be doable. This would give me a first draft in roughly a hundred days and, with editing and re-work, a finished draft in, say, 150 days - about half a year per book. So I set myself the target and I've been monitoring myself ever since. I have records of my productivity for 49 days now and it's interesting.

First thing to notice is that my running average is well below the 1,000 word target. In fact, it is 704 words/day. I only have 33,000-odd words written instead of the 50,000 I should have by now. I tell myself that the first half of the book requires more research and more thinking about than the second half but I'm not entirely convinced.

The second thing is that my output is incredibly variable. There are days - sometimes runs of several days, when I write nothing at all. There are others - sadly, no runs - where I do 2,500 words. (My output looks more bi-polar than normally distributed but, for what it's worth, the standard deviation on that 704 average is a whopping 646.)

The third interesting thing is the way the forecast changes over time. The forecast is the number of words I will have written in a hundred days based on how many I've written so far and how many more I'm going to write if I keep up the same average output. This figure fell steadily from the initial 100,000 until it hit about 85,000 fifteen days ago. Since then, it has bumped along at the same level. This means my average output appears to have increased when my forecast output reached some kind of threshold level. What this tells me is that my earlier, lower average was just laziness. When I'm faced with the stark reality of not having enough words at the end of the project for a decent-sized book, I am clearly able to push myself a little harder.

Sadly, the fourth (and last) interesting statistic is my running calculation of how many words a day I will have to write now and for the remaining 52 days, to finish on target for my initial plan. It currently stands at 2,200 words/day. Given my current struggles to produce 1,000, 2,000+ looks impossible.

So the book might overrun a little.

Of course, the book will be as long as it needs to be. This 1,000 words/day for 100 days target is purely arbitrary, based on a rough guess (a gut feel) as to how long this particular book will end up being. Perhaps it really is an 85,000-word book and I'm bang on target! I won't really know until I'm farther along - it's not something I'm good at estimating yet.

On the other hand, maybe 2,200 words/day isn't impossible if I just stop writing blog postings, answering emails, chipping in on news groups, and reading all those blogs in my feed reader.

Technical Skills Needed By Writers

Over on About.com there's a writing blog that deserves a bit more patronage. Alena's Freelance Writing Blog is usually talking about something interesting. Currently, she's asking the question, 'What Tech Do We NEED To Know As Writers?' And it's a tricky sort of question.

My first reaction is, 'Not much!' People have been writing for thousands of years without needing anything more than a flat surface and something to make marks with. Then along came pens and paper and you had to know how to sharpen a quill and mix ink. Much later came the typewriter, but still little demand on technical skills - a bit of maintenance now and then, learning how to insert carbon paper, how to poke at the hammers with the end of a pencil to unjam them, etc.. Even the electric typewriter wasn't exactly challenging.

But then came the word-processor and the Internet.

I first used a word-processor in about 1980 - about the same time I first used email. It was called WordStar and ran on MSDos. I immediately fell in love with the whole technology. By simply inserting 'control coldes' in the text I could change fonts, embolden text, italicise text, and so on. It was wonderful. I didn't use a typewriter ever again. When the first Apple Macintoshes appeared a couple of years later, word processing was taken to new and dizzying heights with WYSIWIG formatting and new software that allowed the definition of styles. Does anyone remember an astonishingly ahead-of-its-time product called MacAuthor which came out in about 1985? It didn't survive long unfortunately but it didn't matter too much because Microsoft Word, which appeared on the Mac in 1984, soon became a first-class product and the deserved front-runner in the field.

From the mid-Eighties and beyond, being a competent user of a word processor became something that required a bit of skill. The programs were so complicated, so 'feature rich', that learning to use one well required enthusiasm and patience, or an actual training course. They have only grown more complicated since.

But could a writer work without a word processor these days? Could we go back to using typewriters, say, or pen and paper? Emphatically, no. Handwritten manuscripts have not been accepted by publishers for decades now and, while most will still accept a typewritten MS, there is a strong movement towards electronic submission (i.e. sending word-processor files by email). In fact, some magazines will now only accept electronic submissions.

So a writer needs to know how to work their wordprocessor, how to save files in appropriate formats (.RTF and .PDF being two of the more popular ones), and how to use an email program at least to the standard of being able to send a message with a file attached (but probably to the level of being able to maintain several email accounts and integrate them in your email client.) And all this implies being able to use a computer and one of the leading operating systems (Windows, say), to install programs, update programs, manage a filing system, back up files, install and maintain anti-virus and ant-malware software, wire a computer and its peripherals together, upgrade the bits of a computer system every few years, and on, and on.

And that's without the Web. As I've been discovering lately, public libraries (especially out here in the country) are a poor substitute for the Web as a research tool. If I need a biography of Lenin, a street map of Ommen in the Netherlands, pictures of the Berlaymont Building in Brussels, tech specs of experimental fusion reactors, and a 1982 calendar - all of which I've needed in the past few weeks as I've done research for my new novel (TimeSplash!) - the local library is no help at all. Only the Web can provide these kind of riches. (Actually, even the Web let me down on the Lenin biography - not enough depth in the online sources. This one was only solved when my daughter found an excellent biography in a second-hand book shop in Brisbane and posted it to me.) Doing research online is a bit of a skill in itself and getting quick answers to questions means knowing where to look and who to ask - much of this being knowledge that has to be acquired, stored and indexed.

And the technical infrastructure that makes this possible is not always trivial. I can't count the hours I've spent researching ISPs and broadband packages, setting up and maintaining my wireless broadband service, finding, learning, acquiring and maintaining browsers and feed readers.

And then we come to blogs and websites - which I won't get into except to say that, unless you're really keen to establish yourself as a 'brand', or unless you really do have a fan-base to keep in touch with, blogs and websites are something a writer really can do without. Having just spent about 20 hours changing from one web-hosting service to another (and I'm still not finished) I'm tempted to say that writers should stay away from websites altogether unless you can afford to pay someone to do it all for you.

All in all, then, you need a considerable amount of technical savvy to use the two basic services that writers really do need - word processing and email. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, you need this level of tech savvy to function as just about anything these days, so the incremental knowledge needed by writers is actually quite small.

Software To Support Writing My New Novel

The mechanics of writing isn't something I've ever bothered much about. At times the technology has been irritating. Do you remember when Microsoft Word used to fall over and die when a file became large, or when PDAs and hand-held computers used to have file size limits? I certainly do and it was a pain, but I coped and it wasn't so bad. It is probably because of the technical inadequacies of older software (things like Word's 'master document' features being so flaky, the inability to do a search or 'find and replace' easily across multiple files, etc.) that I've learned to write book-sized documents in a single, linear lump - keeping the plan in my head rather than in software. It has meant that I tend to do a lot of planning up-front and have a pretty clear idea of how the whole book unfolds before I start writing. Once I start, I can start at the beginning and keep writing to the end.

Yet, lately, I've been tempted by reviews of software that purports to support writers, things like Scrivener (Apple Macs only) which is raved about by one and all. These tools let you plot, write research notes, structure the book, describe characters, include arbitrary background materials, images and so on, track progress, produce final copy, and much, much more, all within a single, integrated environment. It's the kind of thing I could really have used when I was at work, writing ginormous proposals, consultancy reports, and software designs. But would it really help me with writing a book?

To find out, I downloaded yWriter, a free writing tool with many of the features of Scrivener that was developed by Australian author and programmer, Simon Haynes. I've just started writing a new novel (Timesplash!) so it seemed like a good time to try it.

I'm not going to review yWriter (sorry) except to say it did everything it promised to, did it well, and played nicely with all my other software. My only quibble is with the user interface which was a bit non-standard in places - but then, as a usability specialist, I always find fault with user interfaces. So, my congratulations to Simon for a well-made application. If you want novel-writing software, you should definitely try it out.

Having said all that, I didn't get along with it at all. yWriter (and, by extension, Scrivener and all the others) was way too structured for my taste. I found myself putting so much effort into the structuring, it was keeping me from the writing. Maybe it's because I've become so used to working it all out in my head - for example, knowing who my characters are, what motivates them, where they're headed and why, etc. - that explicitly describing it feels like a burden, an unnecessary overhead.

But the experience of using yWriter did make me think about just what tools I do use and do need to get a novel written. Essentially, it comes down to this:

A good word-processor. This must cope with very large files, allow me to navigate around the book using a navigation panel that shows any headings I've used (typically just chapter headings), give me control over formatting through the definition of character, paragraph, page and section styles, and support check-as-you-go spell-checking. It must also do file format conversions, supporting at least .DOC, .RTF, .ODT, and .PDF (different publishers require different file formats and I must also have the ability to save in formats that will last for decades to come - I've lost work in the past because the format it was written in became unreadable after fifteen years!) It must also allow me to set up templates for different kinds of manuscript. I use sWriter from OpenOffice.org - which is not only a good word-processor but also free.

A good browser. I do a lot of research on they fly while I'm writing. I like to have my facts straight. So I tend to check things online all the time (people's biographical details, town layouts, historical facts, foreign words, science and technology, etc.) I use Firefox, which is free, fast, tabbed (I often have five or ten different pages open at the same time), and handles bookmaring well (I set up bookmark folders for the various projects I'm working on to keep all my research handy.)

A spreadsheet. This doesn't have to be fancy. I only use it for keeping track of my progress. I have got into the habit lately of giving myself a words-per-day target. For my new novel, the target is 1,000 words per day - and I'm already slipping (which is OK - there tends to be far more research going on in the early stages of a book than in the later stages.) When I worked, I used to run projects a lot so I like to see where I am against my plan. For a novel, that's just columns for plan, actual, to go, forecast and what I'll need to achieve to catch up - plus a nice chart to make me feel good about progress. For this I use sCalc from OpenOffice.org - which is overkill but its the spreadsheet I use all the time these days.

As for notes about characters and such, I put a table at the end of my novel with the names of characters and places and a one-sentence description of each - just to remind myself (mostly of the names of minor characters and settings). Being a sci-fi writer, I also include the names of invented technologies and any neologisms I've come up with. I sort the table alphabetically and it does me just fine. I give it the heading 'Glossary' so I can quickly jump to it from the nav panel.

The plot is typically done on paper, with a pencil, before I ever start typing. Nothing else is flexible enough (and, yes, I've tried 'mind-mapping' software.) For the new novel, I've typed in some plot notes at the top of each chapter but I'm finding I don't use them. Once the book is plotted, I pretty much know it.

So no purpose-built software for me - I just don't work that way - but I do require quite a bit of software support for my writing. In fact, I also like some hardware support. I like to have a very small, very light computer to carry around with me when I'm away from my home office. For this I use the Asus EeePC running the same OpenOffice.org software and Firefox browser I use on my desktop.