I came across this quote while researching for examples to demonstrate to a new young writer the difference between tell and show.

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
E.L. Doctorow

A fine example on the need to write as if you are the protagonist and all your senses are vibrating.

Another quote quoted that a writer needs to have scribbled a million words before they start getting passable at the craft. I’m not convinced of that although it depends on whether you can include forum posts, blogs, and school excuse letters for your kids. As for stories and novels I’ve completed, I checked my Excel spreadsheet in which I store all relevant details and the sum is 800,000 words. Bah, no wonder big important agents and publishers are ignoring me. Another excellent quote is from the late Isaac Asimov:

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do
nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again
and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you
will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.

Isaac Asimov”
That was sent to me directly from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore. Thanks, Maria for that inspiring kick up the ass for me She (lucky meow) works there where the Hubble Telescope is managed. She rubs shoulders with visiting astronauts and is an important cog in that wonderful machine.  It gives me a tingle to think she’s had one of my stories in there inches away from a real astronaut!

I did send an e-mail to an astronaut at the International Space Station when I was writing my Left Luggage sci fi novel. I needed to know what the exterior struts were constructed of and couldn’t find it on the web. NASA’s website told me which astronauts were up there and after a bit more research I found the e-mail address of one of them. Within an hour he’d sent back a link on the web that told me which aluminium alloy they were. Excellent because it was crucial to my story that the struts could not be magnetic. Having said that the astronaut expressed a miniscule amount of concern that micrometeorites have no difficulty punching holes in aluminium! But as the Asimov quote implores, I write and submit;  write, revise and submit.

There are three pleasures of flying from the UK to the Mediterranean. Looking out of the window watching the reality map glide by; arriving somewhere that is warmer and usually drier than back home; and browsing the inflight magazine. Note I didn’t mention getting there quickly. OK that is important while my wife has to squeeze these trips in between her work, but once she retires maybe we can travel in a more sedate and environmentally friendly style. I will miss the view though, and the inflight magazines.

I used to think it would be a doddle to get my short stories and articles in those magazines but the editors have it mostly sown up with celebrities and famous writers. Writing is rather like being rich. Once you’re rich, you usually get richer; once a writer makes it as a celeb they get more writing work.  And good for them although it was rather irksome to read a Will Self piece in what I think was a BA inflight mag in which he wrote a short geographical essay. There were factual and conceptual errors and in spite of his unique dry near-miserable wit, I could have done better. I think. With that thought in mind I had a dabble at writing some science fiction short essays and stories with the intention of submitting to airplane companies. In Googling for their addresses my heart leapt (not literally, unless the rest of me leapt at the time – otherwise the outcome could be fatal) when I discovered the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine – known in the sci fi writers universe as ASIM. Brilliant, I’ll submit to them. And they’re based in one of my favourite countries – Australia.

Rejection flew straight back. Why? Well for once I tried to write a story that was dark and without my usual silly humour so the comments came back about it being grim and dystopian. Interesting idea but scary. Umm, I could live with some of those although other readers I’d tried it on thought it was funny in spite of my efforts to keep humour out. What is funny to some is dystopian to others.  ASIM is right it is dystopian but worse one of their readers pointed out I’d spelt the main character’s name in three different ways! Aaarrgh. How could I make such a classic amatuer error, but there it was. I’d sent them a copy of the first instead of the last draft! It remains dystopian. All right I’d not heard of that word before and had to look it up even though I’d guessed it was the opposite of utopian. Dystopian = a world in which everything was as bad as it could get. Maybe that is one interpretation of my story – one in which the TV reality big brother series gets out of control – takes over a whole village then town then city then country etc.  It is original in its own way but perhaps too noir for an inflight magazine after all. So I’ve sent ASIM a more cheery story and sent the big brother one to Premonitions. I wonder if they’ll be tempted…

Why do people pretend to be out when the doorbell rings? OK, in our case it’s because of acute embarrassment at our untidiness, but since a lad I’ve always enjoyed a debate with extreme religious groups that attempted to recruit me. Initially it was out of my learning curve and curiosity and then it became better entertainment than TV. Maybe it’s cruel, but the proselityzers have to learn too. hah. And so it is with the current crop of door knockers – the electioneering canvassers. I welcome all (I was going to add ‘and sundry’, but if I welcome all, then sundry is included isn’t it?) especially the political parties I reject. Eh? Yes, the greens and Labour party can have both my votes (I know I only have one, but they don’t know that) and run along to the next house. The right wing and other oddities can come in unless they are prepared to stand for an hour while I fetch a chair and a cup of tea for me! I am a reasonable person and will change my mind on issues if a logical case is presented that defeats my earlier conclusions so they do have a chance. But they are up against it, big time. It’s because I am in entertainment rather than learning mode these days.

So yesterday a woman in a very bright blue suit rang my bell.  She handed me a card with the candidates name writ large to aid my memory cell, and urged me to support him. It’s unlikely, I say, and why should I? She obviously had been through a doorstep training programme and started her spiel with ‘how long have you lived here?”

Well you all know me by now, and so my wicked funny synapse made me blurt out: ‘Well, in exactly two weeks, we will have lived here for twenty eight years, four months and five days.’

That threw her.  Exactitudes of a bizarre nature didn’t feature in her course. But she rebounded with: ‘Do you have any questions for me?”

“I do. I have a problem in the book I’m writing. Would the Vandenberg USAF Base in California be the Mission Control for a military strike against a possible alien space ship?”

“Erm, I’m sorry? Do you have a question about local issues?”

“It could become very local if the aliens landed here. Oh, all right. Why doesn’t your party support the extra cycle path we need to make cycling to Wrexham safer?”

She left in her big Bentley.

I always take my camera with me on bike rides. Today I found two lads in their twenties wandering the road in woe-is-me distress. As you see, their car had taken on itself to emulate the birds in Spring nesting. The lads said they were on their way into Chester when the driver “lost it.” They certainly didn’t seem to have been drinking but I think they were underestimating their “we weren’t going too fast” as clearly they were! However, I attempted to console them. After all, no one was killed, the sheep must have had prescience because they’d flocked to the other side of the field in time, and no other vehicle or person was involved. Consequently, although they could have been charged with careless driving, it’s likely the police won’t be involved.

“It’s not the police, nor the farmer I’m worried about,” said the driver, a twin brother of the passenger. “It’s me mam, and here she comes!”

I threw my leg over my saddle before meeting the angriest woman in Wales.

I was online chatting to a copy-editor yesterday who had spent too many hours weeding a writer’s excessive technical descriptions to that only needed for the story. That writer’s passion for details on his particular hobby take me back to my Young Socialist days. we had public speaking training. One technique was topics out of hat talks. We drew a random piece of paper on which a newspaper headline stared at us as the topic for to spontaneously speak to the group for 10 mins. Great fun. One of us was like that writer, but mad on buses. he knew the size of every bolt and specs for springs, glass and paint on them. He was useless at politics but we tolerated him cos he was a nice lad. He picked his piece of paper and it was Harold Wilson just arrived back from a visit to Germany. So our lad thought for 3 seconds and said:
Harold Wilson was met off his plane by his chauffer-driven Rover, but he could have journeyed from Biggin Hill Airport on the 320 Bus. It would have been the AEC Routemaster 1461, which has the new double hydraulic suspension system. There is a bolt in the third tension bar that… After which we pounced on him amidst hysterics!

The modern trend in sci fi writing is to jettison nearly all technical aspects of spaceships, faster-than-light drives and so on. This is a shame both for writers who relish embarking along those patent office wanderings, and those readers who drool on such details. And where would we have been if Arthur C Clarke had his invention of orbiting artificial satellites deleted?

Although I’ve written horror and science fiction stories I’ve not tried fantasy. Some of my horror leans towards fantasy in that I invoke spirits, ghosts and supernormal abilities. Check them out at http://horrormasters.com But I’m shortly to embark on writing Xaghra’s Revenge, a story inspired by the real life abduction of the entire island of Gozo in the Mediterranean in 1551. The fiction in my story has modern-day descendents but the spirits of the ancients become invoked and they want to play. What I’m not sure of is exactly how to pitch the fantasy element. Gozo has the world’s oldest building at Xaghra and the later pirates and their victims will have spirits, some of whom are demonic. But do I invite these phantoms into play right from the start? Throw the reader in at the fantasy deep end? Some surveys of fantasy readers reveal their reasoning for liking the genre lies in their desire to be lost in alternative universes where it is normal to have dragons, elves, magic and vampires. I understand that with no problems at all, but it’s not the way I usually write. Practically all my stories have main characters that are bog-standard normal people but to whom extraordinary things happen. Readers (OK, two of them) tell me that they like my characters because they identify with them – the well-behaved ones anyway! I am inclined to have two ‘normal’ characters meet in Paris and let the weird stuff with phantoms be a shock, and then become normality for them. What do you think?

Creating an audio book

My good e-friend, Gary Hicks, another survivor from the Hill & Hill Literary Agency crash, has thrown himself at creating an audio version of his science fiction book. He’s created the folloing notes and appeal for anyone who’d like to be a character reader in his production.

So over to you, Gary! 

“Having written a few ‘almost’ books – can they really be called books when they haven’t been published? I’ve been looking at the various ways of ‘publication’ in one form or another. Obviously there’s the agent-mainstream publisher route, then there’s the self-publishing market and finally the vanity publishing market and that’s the lot.
Or so I thought…

There’s a web site – http://www.podiobooks.com – who have audio versions of original books (essentially no agent of publisher representation). They do not pay, unless listeners make a contribution – apparently the author gets something between 50 and 75% of contributions towards their material. It’s not a huge amount I’m sure and no Royalty Advance, author signing tour or anything like that, but (and this is the important part) they do have a world wide listener base.

The current, most common format is the author or someone reading the book. Whilst that works very well with the addition of background music and sound effects, except for a few minor points…

My voice sounds terrible when it’s recorded – keep on getting sinusitis so I tend to sound like a Walrus with a rather nasty head cold!

If you’re not paying attention it is possible to lose track of which character is speaking. When I read things, I drone (as well as the Walrus thing) – I have the perfect voice for a mime artist in fact.

So this is what I’m thinking of, something a little more ambitious. Possibly, it might be viewed as a little over ambitious, but I’m thinking along the lines of the original BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series…

What I’m trying to do is see how many of you might be interested in providing your voices for the characters. This would be completely unpaid, but everyone involved would be credited and receive the completed audio book on CD or more likely a set of CDs.
If this gets off the ground and looks to be doing well from the stand point of Podiobooks, then I’d add a page about it to my home page and would then be asking for a photo and a very brief bio – but that is really someway in the future at the moment.

Right now, might I ask youl to email me with a simple ‘yes’ – there’s no pressure at all, so don’t panic; but if you could let me know one way or the other that’d be great. Once everyone has replied and I have a reasonably good idea of how things stand with regard to voicing characters, then I’ll be back in touch.

Cheers,

Gary (gary.hicks87@ntlworld.ie)”

So if you think you could be a character sound actor then please e-mail Gary!

I know literary agents are people too. And although some have asked me to be one, I’m not sure I’d want to take the risks they do. A lone man agent would have to spend a lot of time and resources networking, taking the publishers out to lunch, photocopying and posting wheelbarrowloads of manuscripts and all without any certainty of a return.

 I read on one agent’s website this week that we writers should remember that agents have feelings and implored us to include gratitude and understanding in our queries. So I followed her immaculate people-friendly guidelines and wrote a friendly Dear Kristin query e-mailed letter ending with groveling thanks for taking the time to read and consider my Left Luggage sci fi novel. A day later the reply came: Dear Author… what? after the website urgings to be polite and all? But the reject goes on to say…

We’d like to apologize in advance for the impersonal nature of this standard rejection letter. Rest assured that we do read every query letter carefully and, unfortunately, this project is not right for us. 

I’m used to form-letter reject letters and so the wording is reasonable but you’d think they could reply with my name!

The most bizarre literary agent reject letter I’ve seen this week was sent to a friend. It read:

“We can’t tell you what we want, but we’ll know it when we see it;
however, don’t send us anything we wouldn’t want.”

Isn’t that the best example of oblique writing? It’s just as well most writers have a terrific sense of humour!

I am withering in an um-ah-um-ah state over a short story I’ve composed in the hope of breaking into the big sci fi magazine market. Analog, Asimov and Fantasy & Science Fiction magazines all say they want stories where vital characters and their relationships are important. This might always have been the case but my impressions as a teen reader were that the sci fi mags put what happened to space ships high up on the agenda, so there has been a shift. So a burst of brain cell activity gave me an idea where a young woman needs to know if her so-so relationship is going somewhere with her bloke. He’s a bit of a lad and she takes him on a camping trip to make her decision on whether to end or strengthen their relationship. Alas for them, a meteor shower that normally brightens the sky as shooting stars, is knocked off course by an alien ship doing a slingshot manoevre around Earth (the cheek of it!). So instead of romantically gazing at the aerial display, they are treated to stratospheric fireworks shortly followed by being punctured by the micrometeorites reaching ground level. Our protagonist’s young man acts heroically, trying to save a doomed driver, and ensuring his fiancee is protected. She sees this brave aspect to his character and is endeared much more.

But at the marvelous horror and sci fi critique group Cafe Doom (and if you write horror please join it – we need more members) I am urged to rewrite the story. I’m told I’ve skated over the exciting aspect of the alien ship using the Earth to assist their trajectory without calling to say Hello. And I underplay the potential of the ground-breaking-hitting micrometeorites. I can see these angles, but worry that the relationship-character-led story would be a hard sf plot-led story. I’ll have to write them both – and send one each to Asimov and Analog mags. And so my workload doubles.

At last my website is up and running once again. Either the Host Department is a victim of their own success and so didn’t have suffiicient back up servers or incompetent beyond reasonableness. But at least they have online chat support. They were very good at making sure the word Sir came into every other excuse, and they did give me an estimate when the 65 Giga Bytes of data would finish being copied to a working system. I didn’t needn’t 65 GB. I think my share of that comes to around 200 Mb if that. The web pages are very efficient on space but images take the room.

 I have this batty idea of using some aspects of Game Theory in one of my sci fi novel plots. In Exit, Pursued by a Bee, I have a main character trying to persuade the military to resist their urge to blast away at alien artifacts that are orbiting Earth. Maybe the use of Game Theory could help her persuade the colonels and so the Pentagon to rest their trigger fingers. Seems reasonable since it’s widely known that they use GT in real life. And so I need a good book: A Duffer’s Guide to Game Theory Made Even More Simple. I tried Wikipedia but whoever wrote the notes on GT there obviously doesn’t want anyone else to play.

And so Spring is kinda here. There’s sufficient rainwater to suggest springs in the sky. As part of the Nelder household springclean, is the urge to clear much of the 30 years accumulated junk we’ve hitherto labelled as essential. Much of it could be classed as former trees – we have thousands of books. Of course I don’t want to throw away my sci book collection, but little else is sacrosanct. In fact my old geography teaching volumes are downright dangerous – donate them to charity and you can guarantee people getting lost or loosening mites as they head scratch to understand why strange places called Rhodesia and USSR exist.  So I need green bin bags ‘cos they’re the ones our council colour code paper recycling. But I ran out and so was about to cycle to the town hall for more when the bin lorry passed. May I have a spare green bag please? Yeah, mate, have a few. So now our house is bulging with more green bags than we had books!

I used the shredder to make safe some of my older stories – first drafts and other early embarrassments. I made a discovery. A copy of my ace Prime Meridian sci fi short – with scribbles and tea stains, takes up the space of, say, a large mailing envelope. But shred it and its volume doubles. My little stories, once cut up, become Thomas Pynchon block busters!