“Deadline” in Reactor Magazine

My flash story “Deadline,” which appeared in Factor Four Magazine, was recently featured in an article in Reactor Magazine, the daily news report from Tor.com. You can see it here. Spoiler alert: the article describes my story as “emotional and bittersweet.”

CNI Classified Vol. 3 on Pre-sale

The latest in the Code Name: Intrepid series, CNI Classified Volume 3, about a pre-WW 2 special missions team designed “investigate incidents and situations which threaten the security of the United States that are outside the realm of normal occurrence,” is available for pre-sale and features my story, “The Alpine Affair.” There was no shortage of unexplained events in the war, but there were also a lot of unexplained events that took place before the war, problems that if not dealt with quickly and quietly might have meant an entirely different outcome when hostilities broke out. Where the limits of our reality are stretched, and the customary rules of warfare do not apply, that’s when the Intrepid team is called in.

The Course of True Storytelling…

…never runs true, as they say. I’m working on a novel, and things were going well until I hit a block. I couldn’t move forward. I thought it must be a structural problem. I reasoned that I should move around the sequence of events; if you can’t move your story in one direction, find a new direction forward. It’s your story; you can tell it any way you want, and (spoiler alert!) you can always revise anyway.

So I skipped the piece I was going to write next and moved the part that was supposed to come after that into its place. It worked! My book could now comfortably be categorized as containing Parts A, B, and C. I was able to move along, and when I came to C (formerly B), I started to write it and (as usually happens) it turned out entirely different from what I had originally envisioned. Truthfully, it made more sense this way and it opened up new possibilities.

Which led me to another block. Part C ended (for now) with a cliffhanger, a seriously bad situation for my heroes. (As in, “What do you mean ‘man overboard’? We just went through hyperspace! That was five hundred light years ago!” Not good.) But worse than that, I was hanging five hundred lights years back. I really liked this new cliffhanger, but there was one small problem: Part B (formerly Part C) introduced a new character, whose presence made pursuing the new cliffhanger extremely difficult because it would mean that he would come to know things that he must not yet know. For him to know these things would short-circuit the next 30,000 words and I’d have a really short book on my hands.

Come to think of it, his presence in the story at this point made everything more difficult, for the same reasons. Much as I hated to say it, while writing Part B as I did had gotten me past my first block, Part B had to go. Well, it had to be moved, anyway, to–you guessed it–Part C. Where it was supposed to be in the first place. Unless it eventually becomes Part D. I haven’t gotten that far.

But of course, there is a lesson to be taken from this: The only draft that matters is your last one. Every great work of literature started out as a rough draft. It’s irrelevant. Readers only see the final draft. Everything up to that point is disposable, and more importantly, invisible. Would it matter if Fahrenheit 451 was written by hand on index cards that were moved around to form a plot? No. Would anyone care if Dune were drafted backwards? Uh-uh. They wouldn’t even know. Writing a novel is like cleaning up your house before your parents come back from their long weekend. So long as everything looks neat, no one is ever going to know that last night you almost had to call the fire department.

Soames & Webster: New Science Fiction Launch

Today I dropped the compilation of my space-traveling billionaire playboy Barclay Webster and his indispensable (and unflappable) valet, Soames. The Adventures of Soames and Webster: A space opera of manners. Think Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster in space. With pirates. And Bertie wants to be a private eye.

What could possibly go wrong?

Flash Sale

This Saturday and Sunday Alien House is on sale for only $.99. Because I felt like it.

My Right to Write Right

It’s always been said, and I believe it, that you should write what you want to read. I don’t see how you can argue with this. Sure, you can say that this isn’t the most commercial approach, but if you’re in this business to make money, then you’re in the wrong business. The chances of immediate and significant commercial success in writing are greater than of winning the lottery, but the lottery is a lot less work.

The problem with the commercial approach (assuming you can make it work) is that you’re going to spend your life writing what makes you money and not what makes you happy. This is not a “woke” aphorism; this is whether you want writing to be like any other 9-to-5 job or if you want to spend your days being your own boss and daydreaming for a living. I mean, you’re going to write either way.

Most of us who write do it because we simply can’t help ourselves. Writing is our compulsion. If I skip it long enough, I get withdrawal symptoms. I start getting antsy and nervous and feeling as if life is slipping away from my control–the same symptoms I get when my submissions have been out too long. I guess you can’t win.

If you’re going to write anyway, you might as well write something you enjoy. Stories come out of your head. If you aren’t enjoying what’s coming out of your head, then you either need to be a horror writer or in therapy. Probably both.

So I write what I would want to read. Which is good, because I’m going to have to read it at least two or three times before I start subbing it, and again if I sell it and have to review the galleys. If I don’t like what I’m doing, I’m going to be bored out of my skull.

Write what you’d like to read if someone else wrote it. You may sell it; you may not. But if you keep doing that, if you keep on putting down the stories you love, then you will sell them. Because some editor out there loves those stories too. And he knows how to reach others who love them. It may be a small circle, but you will have contributed to their love and they will appreciate you. Heck, they’ll even pay you.

Someday, maybe, if you’re the luckiest snowball in hell, they’ll pay you a lot.

The Pantser and the Plodder

They come up all the time, the two questions that every writer must face: How often do you have to write? And how long should a story take to write?

Like most questions that writers face, these do not have an answer.

Well, let’s just say they don’t have a single answer. In his legendary On Writing, Stephen King says that you have to write every day, without fail. And in a perfect world, where writers didn’t need day jobs, didn’t have spouses and kids who need them (not that there’s anything wrong with spouses and kids!), and didn’t have to take out the garbage, get the car serviced, call the roofer, or drive to the in-laws for holidays…in other words, where writers were free simply to write, that would be absolutely true.

Sound like your life? Nope, not mine either. So the best answer to that question is: You should write as close to every day as you can. But don’t feel guilty if you can’t. Because the truth is, you have other responsibilities. Now, if you’re a full-time professional writer who supports your family with your novels, that’s different. Again, does that sound like your life?

And then there’s the second question, and it’s trickier. The short answer is, of course, that a story takes as long as it takes, but that’s more of a length than a time determination. The real answer is: A story takes as long as it takes.

In the words of Inigo Montoya, “Let me ‘splain.” I’ve written a 3000-word story in two days, but a 4000-word short story can easily take me four weeks. I once wrote a 60,000-word novel in less than 60 days; a 90,000-word novel can easily take six months or more.

Does that make it clear?

Each piece of fiction is different and requires a different amount of effort and thought (which is also effort, as we keep trying to explain to all those people who think that just because we’re sitting late at night in a dark room that we must be asleep–no, we’re working). And it doesn’t get easier the longer you do it. Just ask George R.R. Martin; the poor man can’t work for all the folks asking him to work faster. And Patrick Rothfuss? Let’s not go there.

There is common theme among all successful writers, however, and I’m not talking about just the bestsellers, but all of us who write: Persistence. It’s not a matter of how many stories you start. It’s a matter of how many you finish.

Be the tortoise or be the hare. They both reached the finish line eventually.

Filling the Lonely Hours

It’s pretty much accepted advice that if you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. In fact, there are those who say you are not a writer if you don’t write every day. (They’re wrong, but that’s another topic.) What they don’t say is why you have to write every day. Is it to hone your craft? Is it to increase production? Actually, it’s neither of these things.

The real reason you need to write every day is because otherwise you’ll go crazy waiting.

Writing is a slog, a lot of hard work followed by more hard work, and then you send off your story and you breathe a sigh of relief that your hard work is done.

Except it isn’t. Because the hardest work you have to do as a writer is waiting for everyone else to do what you need them to do. You wait for the editor to read your submission. If it’s rejected, you wait some more on another editor. If it’s accepted, you wait for edits. Then you wait for your check. Then you wait for the story to hit the newsstands. Then you wait to see if there are any reviews. Then you–well, you get the idea. A lot of the writing process involves other people, whose lives do not revolve around your story. And boy, do they let you know it. Didn’t you write every day for a month to produce this masterpiece? So how can anyone just let it sit in the slush pile or on their TBR shelf?

Such questions will drive you nuts. You know what’s going on, the slush readers and the editors and the printers and so on, but there’s nothing you can do about any of it. So it’s either stew in your own juices, or write something else. Because that’s the only aspect of this entire business that’s in your hands. You write because you need something to do.

Which means if it doesn’t get done, it’s your fault. Which is another item to worry about. But as they say, “With great writing comes great…” something. I forget. I should’ve written it down.

“Daydreams” at Stupefying Stories

My (very) short story “Daydreams” will debut tomorrow at Stupefying Stories. Remember all the times as kids when we wished for flying cars? And how many times have you said, “If only I knew then what I know now?”

Yeah. Well, be careful what you wish for.

Shh–The Sale is a Secret

In honor of Nemesis being the man with the face no one knows, I’m having a sale on his first book, The Choking Rain, but nobody knows it’s already started. For the next few days, you can get The Choking Rain for $.99 (and book no. 2, The Scent of Death, for $2.99).

It’s 1932, the world is in the midst of a depression, and the storm clouds of conflict are already gathering in Europe. War is still years away, but the preparations are beginning… In Los Angeles, the Olympic Games are set to start in a few months, but suddenly a rash of mysterious deaths strikes the city, men dying in the streets as if strangled by invisible hands. As the list of victims rolls on, a former World War I ace is drawn into the mystery when he foils his sister’s attempted kidnapping, but the fingers of the plot are still closing, and he finds himself trapped in a nightmare that could envelop not only Los Angeles, but the entire United States…

Image created by Wendy Nikel