So here on my normal blog, I talk about Science-Fiction on Fridays and originally at the start of the week I was going to do that on the Art of Procrastination too this Friday. Maybe find something interesting to talk about in regard to what it takes to get into the SFWA, or something else that tied it to publishing.

But midnight starts the annual 3-day Novel Challenge. I'm taking the weekend off from being a publisher. Until midnight on Monday I'm just a writer. I like to talk about writing. And cheese. And occasionally sheep.

Someday on here I'll go into the whole story of why we're called Golden Fleece Press. Or maybe Kate will. One of us will happily drag you into the fabled land of crazy with us eventually, don't worry. When we do, why I've mentioned sheep when I'm going to talk about World Builder's Disease will suddenly, miraculously, make sense. You're welcome.

I have fully realized, type A, un-treatable World Builders Disease. Like it needs a national day of recognition, it's so bad. So I should understand the impetus to draw a map of your fantasy kingdom, or tell me the full five-generational family tree of your main character. I should have gobbled up those pages of genetic coding in Jurassic Park, instead of skimming past them to get back to the swimming T-Rex.

But I don't, and I didn't. I lose patience incredibly quickly with information I don't need.

You think the next thing I say is going to be that you shouldn't do all that, don't you?

Not in a million years. Because that highly-detailed, rich background world hiding in your notebook will leak onto the page in a million other places. In places I want it, because it keeps your world and your characters from being weak card-board cut-outs. So watercolor a full topographical map of your kingdom. Figure out the exact science of gene-splicing your frog-bat. Determine exactly how Frank Idiot the Third is directly related to the Holy Roman Emperor.

Just only tell me the stuff I actually need to know.

This super short post is brought to you by the fact it is 11:28 and I'm already itching to dive into creating a pin-board of visual inspiration I shouldn't have time to look at this weekend.

Cross-posted from The Art of Procrastination.

I'm going to try to be clever about taking critique. 

Well, I'll probably avoid striving for clever. You know what they say about clever's failure-mode. 

There's no good, sure-fire way to make yourself ready for critique. You work on anything--a piece of artwork, or a short story, or a novel--to the fullest extent you're able, and then you turn it loose on the world. Hopefully, if you're serious about it, you've turned int loose on a small section of the world the first time. A couple of friends from writing group, or some other people you trust to give you an honest opinion that doesn't crush you. As writers we talk a lot about the importance of getting critique.

We don't talk so much about how you're supposed to give it. And that's a little sad, because I think they're actually more linked than people tend to assume. There's an art-form to giving someone an honest opinion about their work without getting their back up. I speak from experience, I've failed at this a few times in my life. Thankfully not nearly as frequently as other people have failed at it in my direction. And maybe that's part of my dues as a writer, developing a thick skin and learning to take the good suggestions no matter how much they piss me off.

I'm not gonna lie, if you're in this writing thing for the long haul you need that skill.

But you need the other one too, you need to learn how to critique other people's worth without making them get defensive and discount you. So, I'm going to give you a short 5 point list that I try to keep in mind every time I look at a new piece. 

1) Stay Positive! No one wants to hear their stuff's crap. Especially if it is. Find something nice to say. At least equally as often as you have a critique. 
2) Don't pull your punches. If there's something wrong with a piece of work, it doesn't help anyone to keep it to yourself. If you've got a problem it's likely other people will too. There's a little danger here, if you can't tell your own soft spots, but you'll learn in time.
3)Remember what you're reading. There are different conventions for different genres. Things that work in a Romance novel don't always work in mainstream fiction, or Sci-Fi, or Fantasy, or more or less anything else you can think of. The reverse is generally true. And I'm a big one for touting that the days of writing expressly to genre are dead, sure. You should still remember who the audience of the thing you're reading is. 
4)Read slow. If you're not in the mood, stop and go back later. Imagine how much effort that piece of work has taken, and try to give it it's best shake possible, just like you'd want someone to do for you.
5)Try really hard not to be pedantic. This one should be fairly self-explanatory, but it's actually much harder than you'd think. One of the pitfalls of being a writer is our love of words, and--obviously--sometimes we get carried away. Okay, if you're like me your general state is sort of carried away. Whichever. Potato, potato (If anybody gets that joke I will be unreasonably pleased).

Alright, small monstrous things, go and do. I'll see you again on Friday.

While we were on vacation this week, near Lake Anna, we experienced a test of the Nuclear Emergency Preparedness system. There's a nuke plant, that provides a decent sized chunk of the power consumption for the southern half of the Washington DC area there. 

I honestly can't explain what that it feels like, being on a beach enjoying the day when the nuke sirens start up. It was a bit like being in one of those 1980's cold-war disaster movies. And as surreal as that was, I promise it was for the best. Obviously it's for the best that they test them, but also that we were in public when they went off. 

My small scientific replica is nervous about things like alarms and emergency signals. And vehicles, and...lets just say there's a family history of nervousness I had a fairly good indication was coming before he was born. We deal, generally positively and without a lot of drama. 

There were probably sixty or so people on that beach with us, and other than the initial jump, none of them cared about the siren. The beach isn't much of a tourist area, it was at Lake Anna State Park, which I seriously recommend, if you ever happen to be in the area (I have literally no clue why you would be). So being surrounded by locals meant the parental units stayed calm about the insanely loud, jarring, faintly terrifying siren when it started. Being calm yourself makes it much easier to keep small people-like things calm too. 

Apparently this is a test they do the third Wednesday of every month at 12pm. Another good thing to know, if you're ever in the area. If the sirens go off times other than that, as my dear-husband and I said on the day, don't get your shit, just get out. 

Fun bit of trivia? I found this newspaper article that talks about a series of false alarms this particular system had, back in the 1980's. Apparently, once in a while, they just went off. Hehe. Cause that's totally not a problem, taking the time to call the radio station to see if you should be evacuating away from the nuclear power plant...

This aren't the exact kind of sirens used at Lake Anna, but I suspect they sound very similar.

Well-Written Wednesday and Sci-Fi Friday will happen over on The Art of Procrastination this week, in deference to the whole just back from vacation thing.

You would think the pretty little diagram would make it easier to understand, but obviously not.

Off the coast of the island of Antikythera in 1901, while excavating a ship-wreck, a group of archaeologists and divers pulled up a hunk of rock, along with a whole host of other minutia thought to come from the isle of Rhodes, during the time of Julius Caesar. The hunk of rock wasn't particularly interesting, so it went into storage. 

Until about a year later when an archaeologist noticed a gear, embedded in the rock. He believed it to be some kind of astrological clock. But given it's complexity, and their understanding of the other things taken from the site, it fell back into storage. Until someone else picked up the trail in 1951, but even with interest it was still 1971 until they took x-ray and gamma-ray images of the 82 fragments. 

Hundreds, nearly thousands of years in the silt at the bottom of the ocean, and the nearly another hundred in a lab, and still the best we can guess, the Antikythera Mechanism was being taken back to Caesar as a spoil of war. We don't know how many tries it took to create the thing, or who, or how. We're not even entirely sure what it's supposed to do--though totally check out the theories, if you're up for the science content. 

Things like this in science always make my psuedo-science brain buzz (for a fun time, check out Mischa Collins in Stonehenge, Apocalypse, which I'm almost positive mentions this little beauty and even if I'm wrong, it's still worth a watch). There are so many things about the ancient world we don't really understand yet, and I'm not an 'alien assistance' kind of girl, but I always wonder when we're going to fill those holes.

I mentioned yesterday, over at The Art of Procrastination that I spent my weekend wading through the slush-pile. And it's totes not all I did this weekend, mid-edits and two chapters from the end of a book, but it was a large part of it. 

I try not to be insulting about the slush pile, in public anyway. I fail, pretty frequently, but that's another matter entirely. The fact of the matter is we've all been there, and it's a learning process. There are a lot of things I think most of us learn with experience, as we collect that folder of rejections and see what works and what doesn't. Still, I'm pretty sure we'd all like to skip a bit of that. So. Just for you, I've got a pithy ridiculous list of tips (because it's me, I don't know what else you expected).

1. Follow the bloody instructions!
Literally nothing as a reader is as annoying as having to wade through extra stuff you're not going to accept anyway. I know it seems cold, but if I've asked for something in a specific format it's for a reason and I don't have the time or the impetus to decide if you're special enough to be exempt from that. Nobody likes to be ignored, so don't set yourself up for failure by ignoring an editor's requests.

2. Nobody cares.
This one's a little cold too, but it's the truth. Unless you're submitting to a religious publication, I don't want to know about your relationship with whatever your deity of choice is. Unless I'm asking you for an anthology of poetry I don't want to know every place you've been published in the last six years. Unless it's immediately, inherently relevant to the thing you're sending me I don't care. If your cover letter rambles I'll probably skim it at best, and be less inclined to give your submission the kind of attention you'd like me to give it. 

3. Nobody's story is good enough to survive not having an ending.
I've touched on this before, but it bears repeating. A lot. We've gotten some clever, wonderful stories we'd have been happy to publish, until they took a short sharp turn to the left and went off the cliff. Look at your plot, and imagine you're telling your best friend this thing that happened to you in the coffee shop down the block. How many times would they hit you if you walked off where your story ends? Then for the love of all things fluffy, fix it before you send it out.

4. Develop a relationship.
There isn't a publisher out there who doesn't have a twitter account, and a facebook, and... ours included. Hunt them down. With an account with your name on it, because I sure remember that stuff, and I'm sure other people do too. Especially independent or small press publishers. Reply to their tweets, create a relationship, even if it's based around pithy Star Wars one-liners. Find out if they have a mailing list you can be put on. Make yourself a real entity, a person who could possibly be depended upon for content. It's a foot in the door that will cost you minimal effort and no money.

5. Look at the date.
Up there, in the corner, that you wrote when you finished your final draft? How long ago was it? If you haven't changed, demonstrably, as a fledgling writer in the last two years we're gonna have to talk. If you finished that story four years ago and you're still sending it out with that date on it we really have to talk. Unless your Steven King...No, scratch that. Even Steven King changes as the years go by. If it's more than two years old give it another draft before you send it and change the bloody date on the thing.

6. Shotguns are good for hunting, not submissions.
We got a submission for The Golden Fleece. To the wrong email address. I stared at it for a good two minutes, utterly poleaxed. Not only did you not bother to actually read our guidelines, you didn't even look at them. Your sending me a story when you don't know what you're sending it to. You don't know who you're sending it to. In what wacky parallel universe do you live where crap like that works? Do you offer short-term vacation visa's, because I'd like to go visit somewhere my stuff could be published because I scatter-shot all over someone's inbox. 

7. Know your market.
This should fit under that first tick up there, about reading the instructions, but apparently it's a separate thing. I don't understand people sometimes. It should be self-explanatory. Not "This journal is for unpaid dental assistants who like Anime. Gee, maybe they'd like my story about an old man coming to terms with his eventual slide into uselessness in the nursing home." Maybe they would, but probably not. If it's a publication for children your story needs to feature children--this is a strict rule, because small ones are less plastic with that whole suspension of disbelief thing. My seven year old still has to constantly check with me to make sure things are fiction--and for the teen market there's a little more play, but not much. There's not a teenager alive who thinks 40 year old dudes are cool. Unless they're Johnny Depp...and I'm not sure he's even still in his 40's so clearly he's a special case. 

8. Don't be a d-bag.
Yeah, this is another of those self-explanatory ones. Here's the thing. In a book, you can get away with having a truly despicable main or point of view character. Maybe. If you're really good. You can sort of...Stockholm Syndrome us into liking them for other reasons. I'm not saying it's a thing to aim for, because its damn hard to pull off, but it can happen. For a short story market you've got like 2 pages, tops, and arguably like 2 sentences to hook the reader. There's not time to convince me Jack is a really great guy to spite the fact he talks about women like Ian Flemming's more misogynistic cousin (I say this with the full understanding I'm judging Mr Flemming entirely by the existence of a character named Pussy Galore and not having ever read a Bond novel).

9. No, you can't have any more!
Do. Not. EVER. Ask. For. Critique. Ever. Ever ever ever. Like seriously, even if by some small miracle they've offered it before. You aren't Oliver, shuffling up to the table for another bowl. Or you certainly don't want to be. Aside from being seriously unprofessional, I promise with a small press they'll remember, and be seriously unlikely to consider future submissions you send them.

10. "We're drift compatible!"
Everybody tells you to find a crit group. I know. I know. But here's the thing. A crit group, or a couple of friends you're comfortable making a little circle with--even if it's a triangle--will do more for your writing than nearly anything, except possibly a decade of time and a published mentor. Not only are you likely to start learning the things you do wrong--and stop doing them--I promise learning to edit other people's work and give constructive critique will make your work immeasurably better. There are tricks for this, but that's a discussion for another day. The short version is find people you respect as creators, who understand what you need out of this relationship and are marginally willing to give it to you.

Alright, that's all I have for wisdom to impart, mes enfants. I bid you, go and create. Vite vite. 

"Mondays never go well."

Thera looked at the Head Novate through tired, unimpressed eyes. "It's Wednesday."

"I know dear." The older woman strolled through the walled garden, examining the beds one by one. 

It was the youngest girl's day to do the weeding, and because they had just started someone always had to come behind them and ensure they'd not pulled up any of the plants.

"Don't you agree, Thera?"

Thera sighed, and carefully replanted a seedling someone had clearly started to uproot. "That Monday's never go well?"

The Head Novate nodded happily.

Thera nearly bit down on her words. She'd joined the sanctuary on a Monday. A clear bright fall day where she'd been walked up to the gates by her mother and handed over to the sisters like a donated pig.

"I haven't noticed."

The Head Novate smiled, shaking her head. "You are always so politic."

Thera had learned. She'd been a Novate for six years now, from eleven to seventeen. She'd learned some fine skills. When not to speak. When not to even think of speaking. When to bow. When to smile and agree happily. When to smile and agree solemnly. 

How to make jam.

The jam was probably her most useful skill. Because someday when she was alone, when the day came they let her check the girl's weed pulling skills on her own then she'd sneak one of the st of henbane. And then, while the others were all spending the evening in line to the loo, she would be off...

"Come come dear," the Head Novate said quietly. "The henbane isn't ready yet anyway." She patted Thera on the shoulder, and walked toward the kitchen. "Besides, fall is a bad time of year for a sea voyage."

Thera sighed, and focused back on the job at hand. "It's still Wednesday."

I have no explanations for this. It just decided to hang out in my head tonight. Also, you really shouldn't give people henbane. It's not pleasant, and it probably wouldn't kill anybody but all the same...

And can you guess how little I'm paying attention to these titles anymore?

Because it's time for a Year of Creative Pursuits update. 

So, what did I manage this month? Well, the publishing business is still big, and we did a video for our Kickstarter. I'm counting that. My acting skills are such I really should.

I'm also very nearly done with The Case of the Armadillo--two chapters left, and then edits and it'll be on the editors desk, ready for the real world. At some point I may have to talk about how different it is writing short children's books, from the long drawn-out variety.

Next months I've got a major editing deadline looming, not counting all the other secondary publishing deadlines and the continued push for the kickstarter and and and. 

Alright. Time to breathe. It'll happen. I know it will. 

The new idea that happened today just needs to go away.

This weeks Sci-Fi Friday is brought to you by my friend Michael. You can find his regular blog here.

Lovely, wonderful Michael got me his post well on time. The fact this is happening on Sunday instead of Friday might possibly have something to do with me spending a weekend at the lake without any kind of internets.

Anyway, gorge the eyestalks.

Recently this blog discussed the flying cars that we were all promised when the future got here. This romanticized flying car future has yet to materialize though and our continued yearning for it masks an overlooked truth: no one has been promised a flying car utopia since like, the 1950s. More recent generations were promised corporate-run dystopias, which we’ve been delivered by the way. But I don’t want to talk today about flying cars or about the cyberpunk future we live in. I want to talk about something awesome.

You know what’s awesome? Time travel is awesome. I love time travel stories! When done right, they can offer an in depth look at a setting and its characters from multiple perspectives in a short amount of in-universe time.

Groundhog Day is a great, light hearted introduction to this style of story. If you aren’t familiar with the movie, basically Bill Murray’s smarmy character is trapped in a town during Groundhog Day and forced to relive the same day again and again. Not even death is an escape for him, as he simply wakes up in bed the next day.

Why does he repeat the same day again and again? How does this time loop work? Why is it centered on Bill Murray’s character? We never get the answer to these questions in the movie; and why should we? Those questions aren’t what the story is about. The movie is really about the growth that the setting forces on Bill Murray’s character and the people he meets and gets to know along the way.

Part of what I love about Groundhog Day is how over the course of the movie, you see Bill Murray interact with several minor background characters who you might not give much thought to if you saw them walking down the street, but Bill Murray has all the time in the world to get to know the personal life stories of everyone in town and so do we as the viewers.

Ultimately, that movie is a romantic comedy. What if we’re in the mood for something more adventurous? There are plenty of great stories in the time travel genre that fit this qualifier as well! To name another movie that everyone will know: Back to the Future is a perfect example of this. Marty McFly has great adventures as he tries to stop his parents from breaking up and cause him to never be born because of events that he changed when he went to the past. It’s a lovely introduction to time paradoxes and definitely recommended for anyone who wants time travel itself to play a bigger role in the stories. The characters are often wrestling with what they can change in the past to affect the future without causing unintended consequences. Another standout example of this sort of film is Looper which I won’t talk about too much here, but it follows this same sort of slightly more involved time travel film.

But finally we come to my favorite sort of time travel story: the structured time travel story. Now, don’t take that to mean that other time travel stories aren’t structured, but rather it’s the type of story that spends an (often non-trivial) amount of time laying down the rules of how time travel works before the characters go and muck things up and then either have to deal with the consequences of their actions or figure out how to work within the rules to set things right. One example of this is the 2004 movie Primer, which I adore, but it’s a very difficult movie to follow specifically because of how it doesn’t hold your hand as characters are bending the fabric of space-time to their whims. Therefore, I won’t spend more time on it other than to recommend it to you.

Another lovely example of this sort of story is Steins;Gate, a visual novel (which itself is a topic I could easily write a whole blog post about) and the inspiration for this post. In this game, a group of friends accidentally invent a time machine and spend the first half of the game experimenting with it and learning the rules of the system only to find themselves in a horrible trap of their own design.

What I find so powerful and attractive about the game is how the time travel allows for the player to go back in time and interact with other characters differently. A little insight here, provoking a reaction there, it all lends itself to the player developing an intimate relationship with each character, even those who at first seem ancillary.

Time travel stories are captivating and have so much more to offer than what I’ve written about here. If you’re usually turned off to Sci-Fi involving time travel I hope you’ll be intrigued to seek out recommendations of stories that are lighter on the time travel and bigger on character driven interactions. If you’ve never thought about using time travel elements in your stories before, then consider it as a specialized tool for certain settings that let you show similar (or even the same) events from an evolving perspective as your viewpoint character learns more and more about the plot of a story. Time travel, I submit to you all, is awesome.