lizvogel

The problem with all this fancy electronic submitting is that the responses come back too darned fast.

There will be a brief lull in submitting, because the next market on my list is closed to submissions for a few more weeks. But once they reopen, the story will be off again.

Late yesterday, I got another rejection on the short story that's making the rounds.

I decided to deal with it by sending the story out to another market today.

I think I've figured out a way to make the story of plot device D in location X work after all! It involves a contrivance, yes. But it's one medium-sized contrivance, rather than a dozen or so small contrivances working in concert. Oddly, this is more believable.

Readers expect odd things to happen occasionally in stories. After all, the very fact that it's a story worth telling means that something happens that's outside the norm of everyday life, because that's why people read stories, to get away from boring old everyday life. So let's say Joe needs to drive somewhere to get the plot moving, but he has no car and no money. If Joe wins a drawing for a new car, most readers will be willing to roll with that. Joe's allowed one hit of good luck, even if it's kind of a big one. If Joe's old college buddy unexpectedly arrives, having made a spontaneous road trip, and then gets the news that his mother's in the hospital, and has to fly home right away, and hands Joe his car keys and says "Use the car all you want", and incidentally the car has a full tank of gas because Joe's friend filled up at the station on the corner right before he arrived... well, now your average reader is looking a bit askance at how conveniently all this has fallen together. This despite the fact that many people have gone on road trips, or dropped in on a friend unannounced, or had a family emergency, or lent a car to a friend. I myself have stopped to fill the gas tank just before my destination, so I wouldn't have to deal with it first thing on the trip back. Whereas very few people have won brand new cars. Yet somehow, the thing the reader probably hasn't experienced is more believable than the things they have.

Partly this is simply a question of numbers; one piece of good luck will fly better than a dozen, regardless of relative size. But I wonder if some of it isn't also because the reader is familiar with those dozen small events. And that familiarity tells the reader -- unless they've got a lot better luck than I generally do, anyway! -- that things like that just don't happen when you really need them to. In real life, Joe's friend would show up a week after the crisis, or his mother would demand he drive home to help her move rather than being in the hospital. And the car's never full of gas when you really need to go somewhere right now.

But winning a car is far enough outside most people's experience that they don't have a subconscious calibration for whether it might happen at a convenient time. They're already suspending disbelief for that car to be there at all; as long as you don't stretch the rope too far, you can slip a little good timing into the noose alongside the car itself. And as long as the rest of what happens to Joe is believable, and especially if it's bad (bad luck being inherently more believable in stories (ETA link)), most readers will happily ignore how convenient that car was at the beginning; it's just a part of the scenario they signed up for.

(In an effort to clear out some stuff-in-progress, I'm posting some book-review drafts that have been languishing on the hard drive. It's as though it's the end of the year or something.)


Again, ObDisclaimer: These are strictly my opinions, YMMV, etc., etc. More notes for my own future reference than proper reviews; read at your own risk.


Spoilers for: ( The Quiet American, Ride A Pale Horse, The Quiller Memorandum, Think Big, Think Dirty, Dark Duet )

Overall, not an impressive crop, although I must remember Adam Hall next time I'm at the library. Anyone got any recommendations? I like my spies unapologetic and my tradecraft old-school, in attitude if not necessarily in technology.

I may take a little break from fiction for a while, anyway; I've got a massive stack of espionage-related non-fiction awaiting my attention. And there's fiction of my own I should be writing. Or maybe I'll just re-watch =Burn Notice=.

With a little help from the housemate:


Shotguns ring, are you listening?
In the mall, blood is glistening
A terrible sight, we're running in fright
Shopping in a zombie wonderland

In the shoe store, we will build a barricade
And hide behind it til they knock it down
We'll say "Run away!" and they'll say "Brains!
Brains brains brains brains brains."

Later on, we'll perspire
As we set them on fire
With the barbecue set we bought on discount
Shopping in a zombie wonderland.

Keeping a links-list of bug comments I make, purely for my own reference so I don't repeat myself.

Not cross-posted.

http://dw-beta.dreamwidth.org/12455.html?thread=204967#cmt204967

Thanks to certain current events, the plot of my novel-in-progress just fell apart.

I hate writing real world stuff. I wanna go back to writing science fiction!

"If there are people in the world for whom espionage was ever the only possible calling, Bachmann was such a person."

and

"We do detail, not grand vision."

from A Most Wanted Man, 2008

This is why, despite the fact that I sometimes get tired of needing a scorecard to keep all the players straight, I read Le Carre. This is what proper espionage fiction is all about. His spies are spies, not unwillingly dragooned innocents, not angst-laden conscientious semi-objectors. They don't bemoan their involvement in the business; they are the business, and would no more choose otherwise than they would choose to stop breathing. And his plots are about small things, an asset turned here, a document copied there, a dozen little pieces that add up to a certain portion of knowledge or influence, another move in the ever-ongoing game. Vitally important things to the people involved with them, perhaps, but there are no world-domination plots here, no kidnapped heads of state or end-of-America-as-we-know-it. Small stories, that in their smallness contain more reality than the biggest Hollywood marquee.

This, when I say I want an espionage novel, is what I want to read.

I was reading query critique sites last week, as one does when procrastinating one's own submission work. A couple of random comments pinged in my brain, and I decided to try writing a pretend query for an entirely imaginary book, just for the practice.

...I seem to have come up with a new novel idea.

After several days, I'm still quite taken with it. It's a traditional mystery, a little too gritty for a cozy but still fun without being gimmicky. It's even got series potential! I've got a solid grasp of the main character and a significant secondary character (including names), I've already solved a couple of major setting issues, and it gives me an entirely legitimate excuse for thinking about kittens. And best of all, the query's already done!

(Mind you, the query as stands includes a fix-it-later bracket of "[other plot elements]", but that's okay; my ideas usually come like that. I generally subscribe to the E.L. Doctorow approach: "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.")

Of course, I can't start on it until I finish the current novel-in-progress -- or at least, knowing me, it would be unwise. Which means I'd better get cracking on it, eh? If I finish that on schedule, I might try this for NaNo. Assuming I am sufficiently suicidal or concussed as to sign up for NaNo, that is.

I bogged down a bit in the middle of this month, for various reasons including a con and a (hopefully temporary) lack of plot. Which resulted in me coming up to the end of the month rather shorter of words than I would have liked. (The purpose of deadlines is not to leave everything until the day before them, despite what my college career might have implied.) Thus, I half-killed myself last night to get another 900 words, plus a few extra in case I'd mis-added. It would suck, after all, to fall just short.

the new novel = 3389
revision on the previous novel = 317
assorted old-mission stories (& one new mission) = 1894
Total new words in November = 5600

Fortunately, my writing is better than my math skills!

I think it was the revisions that I forgot to count when doing my oh-crap-how-many-more-do-I-need totals. Regardless, generously over quota, so woot! And double woot for cranking out something like 1300 words last night, despite a lousy mood, the siren call of sleep, and a purring cat curled up on me where the laptop needed to be. I might even be well on the way to a salable stand-alone story in the same universe as the novels; we'll see.


I don't generally count fanfic toward word-count quota; that's for potentially professional work only. But it's worth noting that I also turned out a 1671-word Doctor Who story (in two days!), especially because it was based on a prompt that the housemate helpfully gave me to get me out of a funk. I think it may need a rather strict beta-reading before it sees posting -- I went a little adverb- and simile-happy, even by my standards -- but by ghod it got from beginning to end with all the bits in between.


I am officially giving myself a break for December. It is the month of the Holiday of Financial Obligation, which always puts me in a bad mood. Also, I need to do some serious plot wrangling on the new novel, which is vital writing work that isn't captured by word count. Don't want to let my productivity muscles atrophy, however. So, for this month the goal is only 2000 words. We'll crank it back up in January.