Reading comprehension, style and emphasis, and what the reader wants

I've been going back and forth with my editor on Gupta, and while we agree on what the point of the story is and who the characters are, the way in which things are expressed are our primary points of contention. Most of the grammatical and punctuation stuff has been fixed (Ice Cube likes to say, Don't you fuck with my commas; I feel very much the same way, but in this case, yield to experience).

My goal has never been, and hopefully never will be, to write a book or story, or novella, or even essay or something like that, which every single person reading it understands it from start to finish, that all the motivations are clear, all the meanings are apparent, there are no unexplained acts, and there is no skepticism (whether regarding the plot itself, plausibility of characters, certain acts or beliefs, conjectures, and the like).

My goal, since I decided I could write, was to write what I found was most valuable to me. I don't write, and never intended, to write to make money. If we go by Toby's numbers, even if I were to push out a novel this year, I'd still be working full time for this year and the next year, and if my publisher (let's say I get lucky and Tor picks me up) buys my next book, I'll still be working full time and writing full time (I can put down 5,000 words in a full work day, but I have to be really composed and have the ideas sketched out beforehand. Usually, it's far less, like 500-1,250 words a day). So, something like fifty or sixty hours a week at work, followed by another twenty writing, and then the overhead of writing, such as going back-and-forth between myself and an editor or agent or indeed Tor. Tack on another 2-3 hours per week (dividing the monthly aggregate). So I've spent something between 75-80 hours in a week to pick up about a $2/hr raise the first year, maybe a $4/hr raise the next year, and then, maybe, possibly, something like a $20/hr raise the following year if Tor picks up three books.

But for those three years, I've made $48,000 for 3,000 hours or so of work – or about $16/hr. Take taxes out of that, and we're not even talking about enough money to cover my car/motorcycle insurance.

So, I write what I like, and if I run it by somebody and it strikes them the way Banks' Against a Dark Background or Stross' Accelerando (to say nothing of lots of short fiction) struck me, that's a win. But consider how hard it is for most people to really enjoy Accelerando, and if you've read Against a Dark Background, it's a book that, well, I know very few people who would actually, really, understand and appreciate it for what it is.

What I write involves a lot of futility and death, horrible circumstances, and a future so dystopian compared to my contemporaries that "dystopian" isn't really apt. It's sort of, well, describing the Reynolds Revelation Space books, only humanity never wins, the plague conquers everything, and you're lucky if you ever see another person. The idea is, you read the story or book, and you're reading it because it's confusing and deliberately ambiguous. If you put it down for that reason, you're not my readerbase.

If you read a sentence and say, wait, that doesn't make sense, what is he getting at here? You don't really comprehend what's going on because it's (to use my earlier phrase) "choppy and cross-cut" or "irredeemable," and the "reading comprehension" meter goes to about zero. But still, you'll continue, and you realize, my goodness, this is unpleasant, but let's see where he's going with it, afterwards you might be finished, and you might have sick feeling in your stomach. You may put the story or digest down and kind of push it out in front of you and say, "Wow, that kind of sucks..."

That's precisely the point. Don't read anything I write if you're looking for the Foundation series, or Ringworld. I don't really believe in happy endings or redemption, but I do believe that you can convey a message in a story that "hurts the feelings" of the reader, but still conveys that message to the reader, and that is important to the reader. Because it's always been important to me.

Somebody wrote The Wasp Factory, zillions of people read it, a bunch put it down, a huge majority probably said, "oh, ew," and a small portion of the people who finished still said, "oh, ew," but were also stunned. It didn't make sense. It wasn't clear what was going on. That was the whole point. You read because you don't know what's going on, but the pieces that don't quite fit together are so compelling individually that you read. And even if, when you put it down, you still don't understand, at least to me, that's time well spent.

status

I have been spending many, many hours editing with, uh, an editor. Gupta at the moment, although I suppose the title will change. I will be very unavailable as I reconfigure my home network after it gets pushed out to publish. Tissue will be available from Amazon in November. I'll post a link(s) then. I also have four (five?) other short stories in need of publishing, following which SFWA membership, and then it's probably novel/novella time.

Nameless editor, if you read this, thank you. While I am awake at 0300 on a Saturday, I am being productive.

Tense inconsistencies

So you're writing in first person voice.

I headed up the stairs, and reached for a rusty doorknob on a rotten door with peeling paint that had probably been green one day. In. I look around, and I see, she's there, she's got a gun, and really, she wants something other than money. I realized, then, she probably just wanted me killed.

What have we got here? We have present-tense when the narrator walks into the room, describing the situation. This is to smack the reader and say, hey, this is happening! It's not a tense inconsistency. The rest of it could be past-tense as we often do (heck, almost always do) in a first-person voice, but why is switching to the first person for emphasis tense inconsistency?

Good news, though, working with editor. Maybe she'll explain it to me. Gupta is going to see light. Pwomise.

Death wishes

I got so angry today, angry at myself, angry at the world, angry at life, and angry at circumstance that I drove home aggressively, impolitely, most certainly illegally, threw down my keys and wallet when I got home, and went straight for the Bourbon before killing her. A character I love, who I thought about for weeks before sketching her out and writing her story. A character who had potential to live on in subsequent stories, who had the personality required to keep me interested, with charisma, determination, beauty, and great strength.

And I killed her. I took a story I had written and shelved, and I ripped its guts out mercilessly. I took any bit of goodness from that story and I replaced it with fear and uncertainty. I turned a loving mother into a destructive, uncaring killer.

She died. She died for nothing, arbitrarily, horribly, cruelly, and solely to circumstance. This is the part of the script where the character says, "no, not like this!" She was lovely. I don't think I can ever re-read the old story again. Anger lingers; life is fleeting, and fickle.

I needed to destroy something beautiful, and maybe something adult in me told me that doing it to myself on the motorcycle was not the right thing to do. Sitting here with the bourbon, I wonder if I'd rather have her back and me out on the bike with a death wish and a Connecticut-sized chip on my shoulder.

Productivity, achieved, sunlight consumed, pub visited.

short: yup, kitchen sync.

We took the Ninja out on Sunday. It was beautiful out. We had a little trouble getting it to idle, but the gas in it was maybe six or so weeks old, and it's got this finicky choke (I know how to operate a choke from the 70's Datsuns, but this is a 250cc, not 2200cc...), which of course works opposite the throttle. What this means is, if you get the choke to the point where the bike idles at 2000rpm, then you crack the throttle, you lean it out, and it stalls. It was 72° or so out, so not cold as in Virginia-in-November cold, so I can't imagine taking it out in that weather (even though I had planned to), as it'd just be a nightmare to get it warm enough. To get an idea of how warm we had to get the bike, we had to get the needle about half-way up the guage, rather than past the second "line," which is usually where cars become happy.

Anyway, it could have been bad gas (we put two gallons of 87 in it – $6, love it!), a cold bike, or carbs that need a little help. We'll find out by probably taking the bike out tonight.

It really seems the bike is happiest right around 7,000 rpm, nice and hot, and, I guess, fourth gear. At least on the street. Fourth gear on the Ninja, of course, is way different than fourth in the STI (7,000rpm in fourth in the STI is in "seriously illegal" territory). It's so much more intuitive to turn and lean the bike out on the street than it was in the course we took at Apex. At Apex, there just wasn't enough room to lean the bike, even on their eight-foot-delineated slalom. I asked if I was leaning the bike too far at the time (I was riding a DR250) and the instructor replied "no. No way." It didn't really feel stable, but then I couldn't have been doing more than twenty, and it felt like it was going to low-side any second.

But watching Sandy tear ass around a parking lot (I have to admit I'm quite a bit more aggressive on the throttle, but she did get it moving), you lean a lot more than it feels. We're not dragging knees or even pegs, but the pavement on the lot felt a little iffy (it had some cracks in it, some loose gravel, etc., and this is the first time we've been out on the street), and there was no need to push it, so we didn't. When she handed over the keys, she saw me turning around light poles and the like, and realized, yeah, you really do lean a lot if you're turning at thirty or forty. A lot more than it feels like, because as anyone will tell you, once you get those wheels moving like that, it's stable as a rock.

We practiced all our fast/low speed stuff in a big, unoccupied parking lot, both to check the bike and ourselves out. We both felt confident, and the bike demonstrated more than adequate brakes (I found myself mostly using the rear lightly and easing onto the front – the front doesn't apply gradually, it's "a little" followed very quickly by "dive"), and then took her out on the road.

Lots of fun. Lots of lots of lots of fun. So much fun, in fact, that chasing Sandy around the parking lot in the Subaru, I realized she could very much out turn me, definitely out-brake me, and the acceleration was about a wash (the last of which we knew). But after having the bike out for maybe thirty or forty minutes, I got back in the Subaru and looking at turns, my shoulders started to pull in the direction of the turn, and I really, really, wanted to lean. And, well, that doesn't work well in the car.

It was beautiful weather. I got a little sunburned. We had to get up to thirty or so before the wind took the heat off us (I have black leathers and helmet), and after this we bumped into some "family" friends, purely by chance, commiserated, and then headed to the pub (a self-proclaimed "dublin chipper," but not exactly auténtico) for Guinness, chips, and cod. After which we went shopping (with the bad knee, it's been really hard to do things like shopping), and stocked up on the staples – rice, bok choi, tofu, pocari sweat, microwave noodles, and other ingredients we were low on – which we haven't done in probably two months.

After this wonderful morning of activity, we had guts full of fried food, a trunk full of groceries, and simply headed home. Sandy undertook the refrigerator jihad as the new-and-fresh replaced the old-and-oh-my-god-what-is-that, and I sat, doing my knee exercises and copyediting my "unsellable" story, Fair Trade.

Speaking of which, it may well be sellable, and I like it a lot. It's social commentary, a rich story, and the characters and environment are palpable enough you can really smell the sweat and feel the humidity when you read it. And I've retained an editor. So maybe she'll be able to square it up enough that I can get Gupta finally published, Arizona finally published, and I'll scour both Ralan (thanks, Toby) and Duotrope for a market for Fair Trade. Hopefully nobody at DSS/OPM will read Trade and consider it anti-American sentiments; the elements are there, but it's fiction, and frankly is more a commentary on the liberalist movement than a criticism of the US government.

But that's enough for now. Cheers, friends, I feel a lot better. Say hello, or I may just seek you out and harass you with greetings.