There cannot be many lines of work where you spend thousands of hours researching and producing a fine product, paying for it to be checked and polished, but not get paid for it for years — if ever. Not only that, you have to present your crafted work to people who service it (agents and publishers) who maybe are not writers, but who are compelled to reject the vast majority of writers’ work presented to them. I’m not making accusations, just atempting to state the situation. Writers, agents, pubishers, printers, distributers and booksellers all have a valuable part to play in this process. But it seems the writer gets the rough end of the deal – they’re the ones with walls papered with reject slips. These days e-walls with reject e-mails, mostly. Today I had the fastest reject I’ve ever had. I’d found an US agent whose website said they accepted e-mail subs and were actively looking for SF. I submitted this morning, not with any great expectations – just as well. Within the hour I had this reply:

“Thanks for your interest in our agency. As you may know, I run a very small business and unfortunately there are periods when the time that I have to consider new material is very limited. Unfortunately you’ve caught me during one of those periods. Since I can not offer to consider your work in a timely manner I must pass with the hope that you will find an agent who can offer the attention that this deserves.”

Politely written – but probably a standard response, maybe an auto-response. I know agents can get very busy. But come on. This is saying I am too busy to read your pitch letter and definitely too busy to read a page of your novel. I should be grateful I had a response at all. I have a database of my submissions and responses, and there are several with no response at all for 2 years.

On a brighter note I had friendly e-chats today with successful author Sarah Prineas, who writes children’s fantasy for HarperCollins, Jaine Fenn, who writes SF/F in London, and Gary Hicks who writes SF in Co. Galway. Oh, and a few chats with Neil Marr in France – senior editor at BeWrite, Daniel Abelman in Israel who writes clever stuff soon to be published at BeWrite, Beverley Eley in Australia who writes and looks after her horses on 20 acres and via a forum, Gladys Hobson of Ulverston and John Silkstone also of the UK. Good grief, no wonder I hardly wrote much today. Oh and I haven’t mentioned Ed at Cafe Doom, and…

While on my rainy holiday break I took some books to read that were on the top of my list for different reasons. In brief:

The Snow by Adam Roberts. sci fi – the premise intrigued me: snow wouldn’t stop falling forcing people to abandon their jobs and normal life. Eventually society and industry breaks down and it becomes a kinda survival of the smartest story. I enjoyed the first 50 pages or so but then it fell apart as if Roberts didn’t have a credible reason for the snow or the reactions of the military and governments. I couldn’t finish it. Having said that, I still want to know how the plot is resolved so I read another page or two now and then…

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. (seen & enjoyed the film but never read the 1929 book) A Sam Spade detective – advised as essential reading by a member of the Orbiters SF critique group. He said it was the best show not tell book he’d read and where no adverb was unnecessary etc. I can’t agree – loads of tell, and many pleonasms – but it might well have been the most show noir story of its generation. I enjoyed the read but not in the way of ‘how to write’ book.

A Piano in the Pyranees by Tony Hawks. My son wanted me to read this cos he likes the humour and self deprecating manner of Tony Hawks. I liked his Round Ireland with a fridge and often burst out laughing reading that. But I could hardly raise a titter with this one. I’ve read better blogs, which this reads rather like. The funniest para is one in which he describes a form from the local French Mayor which is an application for permission not to need permission to build a swimming pool – <smirk> I like Hawks as a racantoer and personality but if this was his first book I doubt it would have got anywhere even though it moves quite fast and is mildly amusing, especially considering that nothing actually happens.
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds is a sci fi that disappointed me. I liked the premise – a moon of Saturn starts moving out of the ecliptic on its own volition. It’s chased by a comet mining ship to find what they can about it. But it is so pedestrian – I am shocked cos Reynolds is well known. But the writing is lack-lustre – I found no phrase I wish I’d written, which is something I always look for. I found the crew behaved like a badly behaved bunch of egotistical spoilt kids – the leadership swapping so unbelievable. I suppose the fact that it was published at all should give the rest of us hope that we will be too one day!

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee is a Nobel prize for literature and Booker winner – I like to get one of these literary books read now and then. I see why it won – excellently written and yet unforced, in spite of odd words like uxorious. He seems to have a literary formula for many sentences. eg
Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over.
He lives within his income, within his temperament, within his emotional means.
…he steels himself for angry words, a scene.

See how he uses commas to kinda list ideas within the sentence. Only read a third of that so far – I take longer to read literary novels. Sometimes I don’t pass that third of the way in – eg Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow (but I am enjoying it in a masochistic kinda way  - hah).   

It’s more difficult for me to enjoy reading these days as a wannabe writer, compared to my teen years. I grab those top-sellers and read in the hope of finding their secret formulae. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? I go on courses where I’m told to have nothing but conflict and active voice in the first 5 pages, paragraphs, sentence, and yet what do I see in the top sellers? Languorous passive voice, clichés and multiple adverbs. OK, not in all of them – Waugh and Amis knock out textbook phrasing. Tibor Fischer is my inspiration in that he breaks the rule of the author being invisible. His The Thought Gang is my most re-read book and inspired my Escaping Reality humour thriller.

In my own sci fi genre, most of the contemporary writers like in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, and anything by Jon C Grimwood, Charles Stross, and John M Harrison are tightly crafted.

A recently discovered USA writer that intrigued me are James Van Pelt, who actually makes his stories into Analog and Asimov.

Another is Chris Gerrib, a fellow sci fi writer and writer of The Mars Run, a superb sci fi novel of a journey to Mars that doesn’t run to plan.

 The last book I read that came over as pure pleasure was Howard Waldman’s Back There. Not only evocative of France, but of observational skills, self-deprecating humour, the joy of the reading.

Lamenting, as I do, about the state of the sci fi publishing world from the viewpoint of an unknown yet brilliant writer, a senior editor had a word with me that was very interesting. Now, don’t get excited – he’s not a sci fi specialist and is not that keen on my Left Luggage although he’s not read more than the first few pages BEFORE I took his advice and revised it. I woed on about how it seems that in order for an unknown sci fi writer to secure a USA lit agent, I am being asked to have a story published in either Analog or Asimov magazines. That is no end-of-the-universe restaurant carrot soup either. In fact they mainly want famous writers. And acceptance would only make an agent open one eye at me. There’s no automatic entry. So why do we unknowns bother beating ourselves up, spending every spare moment bashing original tales out of our suffering keyboards? This is the editor’s opinion.

“Yip: there’s no doubt there’s a market for SF out there. But could it be, I wonder, that SF readers are adventurous, creative and intelligent folk whose imaginations are such that they’re often also writers … and unwittingly shoot themselves in the foot by overproducing?”

I’m not sure I agree completely. I’ve only been writing sci fi for 6 years or so, attending conferences and communicating with other sci fi writers for 4 and yet it is amazing how the same names keep cropping up. I don’t know them all, but I recognise the names of, say, a hundred writers, many of whom have had short stories published or showcased, and the odd novel self-published or similar, but none made it big with a mainstream publisher or with a great agent. I come across them on Speculations.com, web forums like AbsoluteWrite.com and Yahoo Groups, conferences and writing schools. They all read.

But I also inhabit forums where the emphasis is overwhelmingly on reading – such as the most excellent Fallout Shelter and others. I also serendipitously discover sci fi readers such as Henry, my parcel postman, who is incredibly knowledgeable about all things sci fi. He is on personal hello terms with Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Stephen Baxter and other greats. But he writes not a jot. Thank goodness. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if more sci fi fans are readers & writers than, say, readers of Romance, or Historical Novels. This would make a great research topic for a Literature Undergraduate. Come on students!

We’ve lived in this house for nearly 30 years with all that accumulation of junk that accompanies living, children, bequeathed boxes of memorabilia (most of which meant nothing in my memory!) and assorted mass. There is at least one box in the attic that hasn’t been opened from when we moved from Yorkshire in 1977! We have occasional purges to clear a shelf or a cupboard, but I have hoarder’s inertia. My wife often looks in despair at the thousands of books bending our shelves and gathering dust. But rather than throw them into the charity bags, I get out the feather duster. Now and then I delight in finding duplicate books (besides the piles of my own publications) and proudly announce that the house is tidier by one more volume.  So imagine our reactions when a dream teaching job or two is advertised and she applies for them. Of course my stance has always been: have laptop, will travel. We can always put our belongings in storage and rent out this house while renting one whereever a school is sufficiently wise to employ my physics teacher wife.

So once again I am armed with empty plastic disposal bags to make the sorting out easier.  Black for throwaway unneededs; green for paper and card; pink for plastics and metal; white for glass; and other colours for Oxfam and other charities. After two hours I’ve managed to fill the equivalent of a shoe box, and I’m not certain I really want to give away the bag of glass marbles I played with as a kid, or the Russian dolls even though the outside one sports a crack. But I managed to clear one metre and a bit of bookshelf in a spare bedroom to be followed a few days later by visiting my sister. The relevance? She gave me a big box. I’ve only just opened it to discover 36 volumes of the the SBFC from the early 1950s. Aaarrrgh and yeay alternately left me! These are the books my parents bought for me when I was 4 years old to nurture an interest in Science Fiction. Yes, these Science Fiction Book Club books numbered from 1 – Earth Abides by George R Stewart; 2 – Martian Chronicles by Bradbury, 3 – Last and First Men by Stapledon. All the way to 36 Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. Wow. Sorry Gaynor, that empty shelf is full again!

One of the reasons it takes me at least a year to write a novel is the research I pour into it. Not that it is all needed. For example in Exit, Pursued by a Bee, I have an object hurtling towards the Earth just as the alien artefact-spheres are leaving. Earth people naturally think the aliens are nipping off home because the incoming asteroid – or whatever – is dangerous. In my first draft I noted that if the incoming ‘asteroid’ impactedm it would take out a Houston-sized city. But then I thought – how big and how fast would it have to be to do that? As it happens some clever clogs at the University of Arizona have designed an online computer program here that allows us to play Armageddon. Excellent.

I used it to work out what impact my incoming asteroid would have assuming a) it is the size of the spheres (80 metres across), arriving at the average speed of comets in our solar system (51 km/s), approach near vertical and fairly dense in construction. The results are as follows:

Energy:

Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.79 x 10¹⁸ Joules = 6.66 x 10² MegaTons TNT

The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth during the last 4 billion years is 1.6 x 10⁴years

Atmospheric Entry:

The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 31800 meters = 104000 ft

The projectile reaches the ground in a broken condition. The mass of projectile strikes the surface at velocity 47 km/s = 29.2 miles/s

The impact energy is 2.36 x 10¹⁸ Joules = 5.65 x 10²MegaTons.

The broken projectile fragments strike the ground in an ellipse of dimension 0.234 km by 0.233 km

Major Global Changes:

The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.

The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth’s rotation period or the tilt of its axis.

The impact does not shift the Earth’s orbit noticeably.

Crater Dimensions:

What does this mean?

Crater shape is normal in spite of atmospheric crushing; fragments are not significantly dispersed.

Transient Crater Diameter: 3.59 km = 2.23 miles

Transient Crater Depth: 1.27 km = 0.788 miles

Final Crater Diameter: 4.26 km = 2.64 miles

Final Crater Depth: 0.458 km = 0.284 miles

The crater formed is a complex crater.

The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 0.021 km³ = 0.00503 miles³

Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 2.08 meters = 6.81 feet

Thermal Radiation:

What does this mean?

Time for maximum radiation: 0.0567 seconds after impact

Visible fireball radius: 2.66 km = 1.65 miles

The fireball appears 121 times larger than the sun

Thermal Exposure: 4.51 x 10⁷ Joules/m²

Duration of Irradiation: 34.6 seconds

Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 1300

Effects of Thermal Radiation:

Clothing ignites

Much of the body suffers third degree burns

Newspaper ignites

Plywood flames

Deciduous trees ignite

Grass ignites

Seismic Effects:

What does this mean?

The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 1 seconds.

Richter Scale Magnitude: 6.4

Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 5 km:

VII. Damage negligible in buildings of good design and construction; slight to moderate in well-built ordinary structures; considerable damage in poorly built or badly designed structures; some chimneys broken.

VIII. Damage slight in specially designed structures; considerable damage in ordinary substantial buildings with partial collapse. Damage great in poorly built structures. Fall of chimneys, factory stacks, columns, monuments, walls. Heavy furniture overturned.

Ejecta:

What does this mean?

The ejecta will arrive approximately 32 seconds after the impact.

Your position is beneath the continuous ejecta deposit.

Average Ejecta Thickness: 11.8 m = 38.8 ft

Air Blast:

What does this mean?

The air blast will arrive at approximately 15.2 seconds.

Peak Overpressure: 2.16e+06 Pa = 21.6 bars = 307 psi

Max wind velocity: 1150 m/s = 2580 mph

Sound Intensity: 127 dB (Dangerously Loud)

Damage Description:

Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.

Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.

Multistory steel-framed office-type buildings will suffer extreme frame distortion, incipient collapse.

Highway truss bridges will collapse.

Highway girder bridges will collapse.

Glass windows will shatter.

Cars and trucks will be largely displaced and grossly distorted and will require rebuilding before use.

Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.

 Interestingly, the effects of the air blast – at 5km distance from impact – is more than the seismic or other effects. The program assumes, and calculates, that the object breaks up, but suppose it is an incoming artefact that is designed to stay in one piece? Never mind, it is an interesting simulation program that allows many re-runs so I can change the parameters. Maybe in another month of experimenting I’ll be ready to finish the sentence I started off with!

Wow, thanks to those readers who sent me e-mails about whether I needed to care whether my fictional crew of a shuttle mission were credible or not. Credible as in pure in heart and deed as per the public conception of NASA crew rather than as that of Red Dwarf’s menagerie of human and near-human beings. Also thanks to those who left me comments in this blog machinery. Maria actually works, now and then, with the real astronauts when they have to plod around on the ground, so she knows they are real people with the kinda sense of humour and foibles I imbue my fictional characters with.

I disappeared from my street this last week as my hard-working teacher wife hurled me into our car for a holiday break in Devon, UK. Luckily I had time to grab a laptop or my writing would have suffered withdrawal symptoms. But I thoroughly relished the Eden Project in Cornwall near St. Austell. They have two huge plastic envelope biomes, large enough for the tallest rainforest trees and low level cumulus clouds – hah! Excellent display of plants and the smaller of creatures that inhabit those places for real. As I wondered around that, and the Mediterranean biome, I couldn’t help but think of how those kind of giant plastic bubbles would fare in the initial stages of terraforming Mars. Extra asteroid and micrometeorite protection would be required on a planet with such a thin atmosphere. Maybe ground-to-air missiles would be transported over there – with instructions to not fire on incoming asteroids with friendly flags displayed.

On returning home I found a dreaded self-addressed envelope on the doormat. Yes, the first rejection from a literary agency of my renewed, revised and re-invigorated Left Luggage sci fi trilogy. Anubis say: “Unfortunately, the material you are proposing is not quite what we are looking for.” They also wish me luck with other agencies – so thanks for those positive wishes, though an indication of what you are actually looking for, if not a mind-blowing original premise sci fi novel, would have been handy!

I smacked my hand today because I shouldn’t have laughed. After I’d been told the crew of the Marimar shuttle craft in my Left Luggage story were not credible as NASA astronauts because of their humorous banter and other too-human traits, I’d spent time and effort honing down their nature to be more like the world’s perception of how the crew should behave. Now the main character, Jill, is a sexy forthright figure who always likes to get her own way, even to the point of disrespecting her commander. I modelled her, to an extent on a couple of real women astronauts. One, like my Jill, is good at using the remote grabber. Sadly, the read model for my character was arrested the other day in real life and faces charges related to her lusting after a married astronaut, who isn’t her husband. Attempted murder is alleged. I’m not going to give the details of Lisa Nowak’s personal life here but only to make a writerly point.

Editors tell me that the fictional characters I have maybe be too OTT and so I tone them down only to find that the real astronauts are even more OTT! But then it’s not a true crime story is it? When you read true crime, your stomach churns to the amazing unbelievability of what real people do. Far too bizarre for fiction!

When reality is too far-fetched. Recently, I’d given a short speech to a Ukranian cosmonaut in my Left Luggage sci fi novel. Two professional editors have reacted badly to it because it is unbelievable to them. Vladimir is wistfully looking out of a porthole in the International Space Station from which one of his colleages is doing an EVA when Vlad wanted to be out there instead. he says to an American astronaut that he gets so much of a kick from the deep infinity of space. And how there is no where the ‘right way up’. The editors virtually puke and comment that astronauts wouldn’t say this. But I’ve listened to real astronauts wax lyrical about their space walk experiences and even the most cold-hearted detached NASA-trained to be motorons people are touched by being out there. In particular the Russians draw on their rich ancestral culture and exotic language. When back into English it is purple prose and flowery but heartfelt. So do I write what I feel that astronaut would really be feeling? Or go with the editors and tone it right down? Other readers of the chapter tell me to convey my instincts, but then I might end up with a heartfelt script that will never get pubilshed. Those editors are not attempting to upset me, but to help me.

I liken it to landscape painting. I remember painting a terrific sunset scene as seen from Cat Bells in the UK Lake District. I took a photograph to assist the final touches on getting home. When it was complete it looked like the top of a chocolate box or a garish birthday card. It was realistic but looked unreal. Many skyscapes are like that; especially cloud shapes. I saw a cumulus cloud looking like a white elephant complete with trunk and tusks the other day. Would you buy that painting? No.

Hard stuff this self editing.

A few minutes ago the plug was pulled on the Community side of BeWrite.net. I was a moderator of the lively forum of writers, and a voluntary editor of the short story submissions that we showcased on the site. Looking through my hard disc I’ve worked on 400 stories by other writers. Not all were posted on the site. Some were unsuitable and sadly rejected but many remain waiting for their original composers to respond after I sent them editing suggestions. I used to receive many congratulations and warm gratitude for my editing – I seem to have  a knack of turning 2D characters into 3D, converting tell to show, spotting inconsistencies – and have been called a wizard! (thanks Robert Blevin!) Why is it sooooo hard to turn those editing skills onto my own work? I am blind to my own faults – grrrr.

 For example in my Left Luggage I noticed, while scrutinising it for pronouns with ambiguous antecedent nouns, that I sometimes wrote a dialogue tag as “Blah,” said Jill. And on other occasions as “Blah,” Jill said. Spot the difference. The latter tag is the more favoured these days so I’ve been wearing out my delete finger – again. Don’t worry if you’ve written yours the other way round – I’m not how important it is really. It’s one of those things that editors notice rather than pleasure readers.

So share a tear for the goodbye to BeWrite. It has freed me and the professionals at BeWrite Books to focus on being more productive and that’s what is important now. Maybe wipe that tear and raise a glass for a job well done over the years.