M. Darusha Wehm

Science fiction and mainstream books by award-winning author M. Darusha Wehm

writing

No News is… No News

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Attentive readers might be wondering where the new book is. After all, it’s a new year, and I do usually release a new novel in the new year. So, what gives?

Well, the quick answer is that my previous schedule is no longer my usual schedule. I finished the first final drafts of two novels in December, so they are now being read by beta readers and getting ready for whatever final lives they will have. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with them, either, since neither of them are Dex books. One of them isn’t even genre fiction. When I know, you’ll know, but for now there’s no new novel news.

What about Dex?

People specifically ask me when the next Dex book is coming out, and the answer is I don’t know. I don’t even know if there will be a next Dex book. At the end of The Beauty of Our Weapons things are changing for Dex and co. and I’m not sure where they are going from there.

I don’t want to be one of those writers who keeps churning out series books just to ride the wave – if I don’t have a great story I need to tell about Dex, I’m not going to write a Dex book. So, we’ll see. I’m not saying there won’t be any more, I’m just saying that if there are more, I don’t know when they’ll materialize.

So while there’s no news in this post, I’m not idle over here. I’ve also got short stories on the go and another project to keep me busy. Hopefully there will be new stuff for you to read soon. For some value of soon anyway.

In the meantime, I’ve posted The Interview, a short story not about Dex but set in The Cubicle Men universe. It was originally published in Podioracket Presents – Glimpses, an anthology of stories by podiobooks authors giving a taste of the worlds of their novels. I hope you like it.

One Trick Ponies

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Most people know me as a science fiction writer. That’s not terribly surprising, given that I’ve got four SF novels out, plus a bunch of SF stories in various markets. I’m active in conversations about SF in various online locales (Google+ is a hotbed of great discussion lately) and I’ve attended SF-themed conventions as a participant and speaker.

If the above isn’t a description of a science fiction writer, I don’t know what is.

But.

I’m not just a science fiction writer. Aside from the fact that I’m not just a writer, I write things that don’t even come close to being classified as SF. Not wanting to get into a “this is SF, this isn’t” argument, I definitely write outside my most recognizable genre.

I started writing seriously as a poet and I’ve had classic haiku published recently. I’ve got a mainstream novel cooking away in edits and I’m getting into straight-up mystery writing. That’s just what’s going on now – who knows what I might do in the future.

Plenty of writers don’t stick to a single genre, and there are certainly anecdotal stories of well-known writers being hamstrung by their readers’ (or editors’) desires to make sure they keep doing what they’ve always done, rather than what they want to do. Which is a shame.

Genre shouldn’t be a cage, whether gilded or rusty barbed-wire. As writers we need realize that one genre-based readership isn’t necessarily going to be interested in our work in other areas, but that should not stop us. Working in other genres is a way to create new readers, plus it keeps us excited about our work. A win-win.

So what do you write that’s not what you’re known for?

The Right Tool for the Job

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There are two things you need to know about me for this story:

1. I am a creature of habit. I love schedules and plans, and have been known to turn down the opportunity to do something awesome because I’d scheduled something lame and totally unimportant for that time. More than once.

2. I used to be a real wrong-tool-for-the-job kind of person. I’d use whatever was handy for just about anything. I once built a set of patio furniture on my balcony with only a handsaw and electric drill. Nothing really wrong with that, except that my balcony wasn’t flat, I had neither a workbench nor a vice. At one point I used a stack of old CDs shoved under one end of a piece of wood to try and recreate a more or less 90° angle to attach the table legs. It sort of worked – good enough for me.

However, living on a cruising boat for several years has broken my attachment to both of these aspects of my character. They’re still there, but I can usually recognize when they have to go. When you’re at the mercy of the weather, plans are written in the sand at low tide. And using the wrong tool can ruin a lot more than your day. When the gale starts ablowing, you reef those sails.

So, I’m getting better at realizing that just becuae I’ve always done something a particular way doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it that way. Which brings me to why I abandoned Nanowrimo this year.

I’m an 8-time successful participant in Nanowrimo, and those writing bursts have all been useful. Several have turned into parts of now-completed novels and the couple of attempts which will never see the light of day in any format were extremely useful writing exercises from which I learned a lot. And so it was that I entered the ninth consecutive November where I anticipated getting down 50000 words of a long form project.

I started on Nov 1, as usual, and by the first weekend of November I was on track wordcount-wise. No problem, right? Except there was a massive problem. I was ruining my writing.

Unlike previous years, I now have a daily writing schedule that I’ve been keeping. It’s been working out really well for me, as I share my time between writing new fiction, editing works in progress and the inevitable administrivia of a self-employed writer. It’s a good schedule (I love schedules!) and it’s been making me crazy productive. Until I screwed it all up with Nanowrimo.

It was obvious that it wasn’t working for me, and when a tool stops being useful I’ve finally learned that you put it aside and get one that is. It was hard, though. The power of the unbroken streak, the call of the familiar – they are very hard for me to ignore. But it became clear that if I carried on with the Nano schedule, I’d be doing it only to have done Nano again. And what’s the point of that? I already know I can do it. I also already know I can write novels without the Nano machine behind me. So why was I doing it again?

No one knows.

So, I quit. The day I decided it was over, the project I’d been working on got better. My ideas crystalized and the writing improved considerably. I’d gotten back on to the writing schedule which was working for me – I’d picked up the correct tool.

In Between Times

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As I write this I’m in one of those strange writing places. As a fairly accomplished procrastinator, I usually have between one and a hundred writing projects on the go in some form or another. Typically there’s a novel being edited, a short story being written and a couple of other things in various states of action.

At the moment, though, I’m kind of in between everything. I have a novel at my alpha reader, another that I’ve put aside in the editing process to simmer, a short story with beta readers and I’m prepping a novel. Okay, so that last one is something to actively work on, but overall I feel kind of like I’m out of work.

I know that as a self-directed writer, this situation is entirely up to me. I could start pounding away on one of those story ideas cluttering up my notebook, I could skip the simmer and get editing that novel, or I could just declare myself to be on holiday, spend my days playing Guitar Hero and finally finish Metallica’s One on hard (it’s just those meedlies at the end — I’m so close I can taste it!).

I’ll pick one of those options soon enough, but for now I’m kind of enjoying the somewhat weightless feeling of being in between projects. I haven’t had it for a long time and it’s interesting. Doubtlessly, something productive will come of it.

image via Gamespot.com

Where is the Serious SF?

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I read this article, Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future by Jonathan McCalmont (found via Ian Sales) a few weeks back and have been mulling over what to say about it. It is long… very long and somewhat inflammatory. I am fairly certain that a lot of SFF writers would get pretty angry at what McCalmont has to say here.

That said, I think anyone writing seriously in SFF should read the whole piece and think about the issues it raises. McCalmont has strong opinions about what is wrong with SF today. I know that many people don’t think anything is wrong with SF today and my intention is not to argue that point. However, this article talks about a perceived sense of disaffection and irony in mainstream SFF nowadays.

I’m drawn to articles like this for two reasons: one) I want to write better, more serious, more complex SF and two) I personally find that, as a reader, I’m disappointed that the kinds of stories I like aren’t being published and critically lauded that often these days.

I say that item two is a matter of personal preference, but McCalmont argues that it’s a result of current SF’s “exhaustion” – essentially that writing about the world as it is through the lens of the world as it could be is just plain difficult, which is why it isn’t being done very often.

His first point is a refutation that writing about a plausible future is impossible because that future is already here.

The most common account of why science fiction no longer attempts to engage with the future is that the future is now deemed to be out of bounds. The world, we are told, changes so quickly that any attempt to predict the future would necessarily be out of date by the time the book was released.

I agree with McCalmont that this is a total cop-out. Sure, writing about any near-future that is based on the current state of the art is tempting the fate of having one’s “predictions” come true or be invalidated. But, so what? It’s fiction and its purpose is, at least ideally, to shine a mirror on the world in which we do live. Part of that world is rapid change, new technologies and obsolescence  Coming up with future-proof stories shouldn’t be the goal.

McCalmont then takes umbrage with the blurring of genre lines. Here, I am in two minds – as I’ve argued earlier, genre to me seems to be a bit of an artificial construction. That said, I did feel a stirring of agreement at this complaint:

The most obvious manifestation of science fiction’s exhaustion with the future has been an intentional blurring of the line between that which was traditionally thought of as science fiction and that which was traditionally thought of as fantasy. As Kincaid puts it, this “is a notion that has clearly taken root with today’s writers since they consistently appropriate the attire of fantasy for what is ostensibly far-future sf, even to the extent of referring unironically to wizards and spells and the like.”

(The article he’s referring to here is Paul Kincaid’s critique of Year’s Best anthologies – another worthwhile read on this subject.)

I think that the problem isn’t so much the lack of strong genre identity as it is a lack of seriousness of purpose to the storytelling. I think McCalmont is wrong when he argues that one leads to the other:

 …in order to produce such a story, a writer must reach the conclusion that genre boundaries and expectations are things unworthy of being taken seriously. The problem is that, once writers began treating genre boundaries with a degree of ironic detachment, they found it rather difficult to be serious about anything at all.

I don’t see the inherent connection there. Denying the validity of strong genre lines does not require the denial of other serious content. McCalmont even goes on to talk about genre-blurring books with strong socio-political aspects.

(I suspect that McCalmont is, like me, generally turned off as a reader as soon as supernatural elements appear. However, fantastic elements can be used in a rigourous, serious story. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes is a fine example.)

Ultimately it is that lack of seriousness that is the crux of McCalmont’s (and my) complaint. There is certainly a market for escapist fiction, and there’s nothing wrong with writing it or reading it. But there is something wrong with it being the only work that is available or lauded. And escapism does have the (I hope) unintended consequence of letting us forget the real consequences of actions. Just as death is merely an inconvenience in a video game, there are no real political and economic consequences of fictional societies that hand-wave away where all that fun stuff comes from.

While the idea of an escapist fantasy that allows middle-class white people to escape their historical responsibility is about as politically dubious as contemporary science fiction gets, the fundamental mechanics of the Nostalgic approach to science fiction are largely value free as they are principally about building a fictional past that fits with how people feel about the present.

and

In contemporary science fiction, the traditionally disenfranchised are encouraged to write as long as their stories do not remind us of the historical inequalities that marginalised these writers in the first place.

For me as a writer, it is a constant challenge to create a universe which is plausible within the constraints of physics and the current technological state of the art, yet “other” enough to be a vehicle to comment on some aspect of the current human condition. What draws me to SF is the ability to use a what-if scenario to examine contemporary issues in an entertaining rather than didactic way.

It’s a careful balance between pure escapism and political screed, and it’s not easy to strike that balance the right way every time. I know I fail and I’ve read writers much better than me who fail, too. But we still ought to try.

The challenge facing contemporary science fiction is to widen the cracks and to peer through the fractured veneer of neoliberalism in an effort to see what could one day come to pass.  These futures, though speculative, must always remain anchored in the present moment as the real challenge facing science fiction is not merely to create a possible future, but to create the type of possible future that is currently deemed unthinkable.

…

We are living in a science fictional world and this means that science fiction is in a unique position to help us to make sense of a dangerously unstable world. By rediscovering its ties to reality and using old tropes to explore new problems, science fiction can provide humanity with its first draft of future history.

Procrastination Pumpkin

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A couple of weeks ago I had a writing breakthrough and it’s all because of a magic pumpkin. This is its story.

(By “magic”, I mean merely special by dint of being used in service of solving a non-pumpkin problem. It wasn’t really magic. Magic isn’t real.)

I had been working on cobbling together the first real draft of a novel I’ve been fighting with on and off for about five years. I’ve descibed it before as wrestling with a kraken – as soon as I got a grip on one part of it, another would rear up out of the vast depths to smack me upside the head. It was, needless to say, a procrastinator’s dream.

I’d been diligently hacking away at the tentacles for a few weeks; forcing myself to face the beast each day, even if it were only for a few minutes. I was getting somewhere, but not fast. The end was not in sight.

Then one day, on a completely unrelated mission, I bought a big pumpkin. I like pumpkin a lot, particularly in baking, and here in New Zealand they don’t sell pureed pumpkin in a can like they do in North America. They sell actual pumpkins. So, hankering for pumpkin spice goodness (and having promised my friend a pumpkin birthday cake), I had to chop and cook and puree this bad boy.

Now, I like to cook and baking is okay, but I hate food prep. Chopping vegetables is boring, annoying work and trying to get into a pumpkin isn’t torture but it sure does suck. But here I was. This pumpkin wasn’t going to chop itself into pieces. Whatcha gonna do?

So there I was, staring at this pumpkin, and it’s just sitting there like a gourd. I did not want to chop up this pumpkin. In fact, I wanted specifically to not chop up this pumpkin. No problem. I’m a good procrastinator. So I just openend up that file with the kraken in it, which looked a hell of a lot better compared to this pumpkin. And a hour later that kraken was nothing more than calamari fixins.

By then I was so high on achievement that dealing with the pumpkin seemed like no big deal, either. And the cake that it turned into was awesome.

So take that pumpkin-krakens.

photo by astrobri

Bad Books

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…by which I don’t mean poorly plotted or badly written books. I mean books containing subject matter which we find uncomfortable or disturbing.

Last week was “Banned Books Week,” and while I don’t really hold a lot of truck with thing-of-the-week weeks, there was a lot of talk on the internet about books that had been banned, so I’ve been thinking about it.

Like most writers, I’d argue that banning books is dumb if your goal is to get people to not read those books, especially if the people you’re targeting are kids or teens. I mean, what’s more appealing than a book the stodgy old farts think is BAD?

As Mark Twain said when the Concord Library banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!” (via this Flavorwire post of quotations from writers of banned books)

But why does a book get banned in the first place? It’s because there’s something in it that makes people feel uncomfortable, that makes them squirm. Something taboo.

Over at Write Anything, there have been a few conversations about whether or not there should be any topic that’s off-limits for a writer. Part one, part two and part three. They’re worth a read, but long story short, I argue no and other commenters point out that there are different ways of handling topics. Some say that if you want to write about touchy subjects you have to approach them with the “right” sensibilities.

I agree in some ways. If you want to write well about taboo subjects, then yes it’s important to really think carefully about the issues surrounding those subjects. But I’d still argue that we have the right to write however we want about whatever we want. We just can’t expect anyone else to like it.

It’s certainly true that people could (and most certainly have) written books that are racist, rude, hateful and vile. But to my mind, that’s a different kind of bad book – one that I don’t want to read, not one that I shouldn’t be allowed to read (or, for that matter, write).

The Craft of Writing

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Grammar counts. Spelling counts. Constructing a well thought-out paragraph complete with coherent sentences counts.

You’d be surprised how many people argue about those points.

In this final instalment of a series about the three aspects of being a fiction creator, I’m going to talk about writing. The craft of writing well.

Oddly, this is the part of the equation which causes many writers and readers to argue. There’s certainly an idea out there that the quality of the story is the most important part. Grammar, formatting, cover art — all those things don’t matter if the story is good enough.

Part of me wants to agree. After all, most people read fiction for enjoyment, for escape. Hardly anyone would read an utterly dull book with perfect grammar, but there are many people who are content to enjoy a rollicking great tale with less than stellar spelling and punctuation.

This is, of course, because of these three different aspects to fiction. Some readers really do only care about the story. And, of course, if you’re a great storyteller, you can always hire or barter for other people to take care of the details. But if I’m serious about creating fiction, then the craft of the medium is an important part of the work. If I were telling stories through film, I ought to have a good working knowledge of the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. If I’m telling the story in written words, I should work on the craft of writing. Just as if I’m seriously trying to get other people to read my work, I have to tend the authorship part of the process.

In many ways, this aspect of the work is the easiest, since it is entirely a skill which can be learned. There are numerous writing courses, books on craft, technical manuals on grammar and punctuation, which can all help people improve their skills in this area. Also, there are technological tools available which help with some parts of this process.

My point with this series is to highlight the many aspects of the serious print fiction creator. It’s not enough to be a perfect grammarian, just as it’s not enough to tell a great tale. To be on top of one’s game all these aspects need to be involved: authorship, storytelling and writing skill.

Tell Me A Story

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I love Henry Rollins. I love his music, his books, his tattoos. But mostly, I love his stories. I’ve seen his spoken word shows live several times and I’m always in awe of his ability to spin a yarn.

The ability to tell a compelling story is the second aspect of being a fiction creator that I want to talk about. To me, this is the part that relies most on innate talent and less on skill. Some people are just great storytellers.

Unlike authorship or good writing technique, it’s hard to teach storytelling. Sure, there are formulae, tropes and structures which help move a story along. And there’s always the tried and true method of just bringing in a man with a gun*. But the really great stories don’t come from a paint-by-numbers kind of process. They are built from an alchemical combination of the author’s experience, imagination and creative prowess.

I do think that we can become better storytellers by coming into contact with more better stories. Watching great films and tv, reading widely, delving into memoir, playing narrative-driven games — all these aspects of storytelling can expose us to different kinds of stories, different takes on those X number of basic plots that are the basis for all tales.

* This is not to imply in any way that Raymond Chandler is anything less than a brilliant storyteller. Seriously. Go read some Chandler. Everything else can wait.

This post is the second in a series about the three aspects of being a fiction creator: Author, Storyteller and Writer.

 

Tips For Editing Your First Novel

In some ways, writing a novel is not that dissimilar to writing a short story – you sit there, write it until it’s done, then edit it until it’s good. But the increased scope of a novel offers some challenges to the editing process that even experienced short fiction authors can find troublesome.

Proofreading and copyediting is pretty much the same, but in a long document, it’s harder to catch all of these. The eye sees what it expects to see. A spellchecker is a good start, but most won’t catch form for from or they’re/their/there problems. However, the spellchecker in Google Docs now offers some contextual corrections for errors like these. Regardless, you’ll need to go over the text several times, and I strongly recommend at least one other set of eyes just for proofreading.

You’ll need more than just technical editing, though. Novels are complex beasts and plot and characterization issues become exponentially more involved with length. Novels allow you to explore stories and characters with greater scope and depth than a short story, which can be a joy. But that latitude also gives authors enough rope to hang themselves — people behaving out of character, sub-plots taking over or disappearing, even the main plot derailing. It can be impossible to hold all the events of your story in your mind as you write, so the editing process becomes essential for working out all these tangled threads.

I’ve learned that there are a few tricks that, when employed during the initial writing phase, really smooth the editing process. I didn’t know where my weaknesses were until I’d written a few novels Editing my first novel was more of a nightmare than it had to be because I just wrote it as it came then had to go over everything from scratch. I had nothing other than the text to go by, and after a few passes I just saw what I knew should be there. Years after I “finished” the book, I still found the odd typo or error. After a bit more experience, I learned that there are some easy things you can do while working on your first draft to make editing less of a chore.

One way to help keep it all together is creating a “story bible”, where all characters, plots and other details are listed. Some authors count each time a character appears and where, to help keep track of who is important and who might be trying to usurp a more major role. Outlines can be useful here as well. I don’t tend to outline much before I start the novel, but I now keep a running synopsis of each chapter as I write it. This helps me keep track at a glance of the action and major events.

One of the other challenges that the novel’s length presents is what, in cinema, is called continuity. In long fiction, especially with many characters, this can be the most difficult part of editing. Does your character have short, brown hair in chapter 3 then mysteriously have long, blonde hair in chapter 17? Worse yet, is her name Clara in chapter 6 and Claire in chapter 10? These problems happen all the time and can be very difficult to find. Using a story bible or character sheets can help stop them before they start, but the editing process is essential to ensuring the constancy of your settings and characters.

From a technical standpoint, using the “replace all” function in your word processing software can be a godsend for situations like these. However, if you’re going to let the machine do any automatic changes for you, I highly recommend using a tool with versioning; I like Scrivener for composition but many other writing tools offer simple methods of version control. Even if you’re just using a basic word processor, you can do your own versioning by saving a copy of your draft before making any major changes.

I have learned that I have a particular problem with time. A scene can start with the sun going down and end with the sun coming up but it’s been only a few hours around noontime when the action occurs. I’ve taken to including what time and day the scene occurs in my running outline to try and head this off at the pass. It also helps me keep track of the passage of time at a simple glance at the outline, which is very helpful when working on pacing.

Not all of these methods will be useful to you; all authors develop their own bags of tricks for keeping their stories in line. And some novels cry out for different techniques than others — an epic historical fantasy might want a complete worldbuilding book while a small cast first contact story may need only a brief outline to make sense of everything. Knowing that the devil is in the details before you start writing is the most important part of preparing for editing.

Editing my first novels would have been much simpler processes had I known this then and every time I come to edit a novel now I find myself grateful to my past self for making those notes about character, setting and time that I refer to over and over again when editing.

What Does It Mean To Be An Author

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I came across a list by Terence Blacker, designed to elicit whether you are really, truly an author? There’s a lot of gold in that list, and I agreed with many of the items (disagreed with a few, too).

It got me thinking about the three aspects of being a fiction creator which I’ve been meaning to talk about anyway. I think the triad is, in alphabetical order:

  1. Author
  2. Storyteller
  3. Writer

I think they are three very different aspects to the craft and require different skills and talents. This post will focus on the first: authorship.

Blacker has some poignant thoughts about authorship, which I’m defining as the professional content creator. His list covers specifically writers, but I’d argue that authorship applies to scriptwriters, playwrights, game designers, et. al.

Blacker’s quiz, in a Jeff Foxworthy “You might be an author if…” style, includes the following ideas which resonated strongly with me:

  • You write a book, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. It turned out not to be the perfect work you once envisaged but, for better or worse, it has reached its destination. If you are lucky enough to be asked to talk about it months later when it is published, you will see it from the outside, almost as if it has been written by a stranger. Your mind is on what you are writing now.
  • You find yourself, rather shamingly being rather sparing when you write letters. You are not being paid. It is not part of your work. Words are your capital.
  • You feel guilty when you are not working. Even on Christmas Day, there is a niggling sense within you that you have something more important to do than drink, laugh and have fun.
  • You are aware that bitterness is the professional and personal enemy of every long-term writer. You have seen it erode the lives of fellow-authors, who brood over past slights and setbacks, and rage at the success of their contemporaries. You have made a mental note not to fall into the same trap.

These concepts tap into the professionalism of authorship, the feeling that the writing is not only fun, compelling or personal, but is in a real sense work. Work the author loves, ideally, but work nonetheless.

The comments to Blacker’s post include a link to more thoughts on being an author by Katie Ward, who points out that “authorliness” also includes the marketing and other adminstrative aspects of being a professional.

The author has an author website to maintain, tweets author tweets, has an author Facebook page, and an author photograph. The author gives author talks, does author interviews, keeps author accounts, files an author tax return, and answers author email.

It seems to me that a lot of the drama that surrounds some of the conversations among fiction writers boils down to a conflation of these three aspects of what we do. A lot of the backlash against the marketing parts of the work comes, I think, from people who aren’t accepting the “author” part of their career.

However, the synthesis of these three parts are what allow someone to have a successful career as a fiction creator.

It’s perfectly fine to write and not to be an author, just as it’s perfectly fine to be a storyteller who doesn’t write. For those of us who do want to synthesize all these parts, I think it’s useful to break down what each aspect does. Particularly since the skills are different and none of us are likely to be equally adept at all parts, it’s good to be able to identify those areas we can work on and focus on increasing those skills.

Call it professional development.

A Glimpse of the Sausage Factory

Photo by Dan Patterson

Editing is among the most important part of serious writing. For new writers, or non-writers interested in the process, this article at Pankhearst is a good primer on the nuts and bolts of editing one’s own fiction.

My original description of the character Matt Adams read:

Matthew Adams was waiting inside the Benz. More bulky and even better tailored than his colleagues, Matt was head of security for Emily’s family’s firm.

I changed this to avoid my previous deliberate repetition of bulky and also to introduce Emily’s father and the fact that something has happened to him.

Matthew Adams was waiting inside the Benz. Bigger than his colleagues and even more exquisitely tailored, he had been her father’s chief of security.