eddyfate

I've been kicking around the idea of doing an irregular column of writing advice called "Head To Keyboard" (or HTK for short), basically talking about things that annoy me about being a writer or an editor. I wasn't sure if it would be part of the blogcast or part of this blog, but more and more my blog is about writing anyhow, so I decided to start doing it here.

After two years of handling the White Wolf slush pile, as well as several more years submitting my work to various publishers, I keep running into five things that people keep doing that doesn't help them one bit in getting published. This isn't secret knowledge, arcane information or even sage advice, but people keep screwing it up over and over and over again, so I thought it's stuff probably worth repeating.

Five Things To Avoid

1. Ignoring submission guidelines. The company you want to write for has them there for a reason. Not only does not following the guidelines automatically irritate the slush pile reader (which won't incline him to regard your submission with any particular sympathy), but there may also be legal aspects that need to be followed before your submission can be considered. Even if you get bored and stop reading this blog now, take this piece of advice with you: follow the damned submission guidelines.

2. Talking shit on the Internet. More and more editors will do a Google search on your name to find out more about you. If they find your forum posts and tweets and blogs about how stupid the editor's company is and what horrible products they produce, you'll get a form rejection. Further, editors do talk to each other, and word gets around. You don't have to be in love with everything that a company produces, but posting it for public view on the Internet won't help your long-term prospects.

3. Having special needs. Love it or hate it, Microsoft Word is the standard -- I have run into few companies that don't assume it as the default format (though RTF is a close second), and never met a company that won't accept it at all. If you want to make money as a writer, get Microsoft Word. If you simply can't, get some software that can convert your documents to Microsoft Word and read Word comments and markup (OpenOffice 3 is good, usable on all three main OS formats, and is free). If you absolutely insist on submitting your magnum opus in Microsoft Works or WordPerfect, I hope you enjoy being rejected unread.

4. Using generic submissions. Take a few minutes before you submit and read up on the company you're submitting to. Get the editor's name right. Specify what product you're submitting for. Make sure the company you're submitting to is even accepting submissions for your kind of manuscript. If you don't care enough about the publisher to get a few details right, odds are they won't care enough to publish you.

5. Plagiarizing your material. Seriously, don't do this. Again, one Google search will find you out. If you need to quote, quote and give credit. But that shit didn't fly in high school, and it won't fly now. And as more and more people read your work, eventually someone's going to notice something odd and out you.

I'm not kidding when I say that simply not doing these five things will get you much further in the slush pile.

This weekend I finally took all of the brainstorming I've done for Night Fall and starting turning it into an outline.

I used a modified version of the Snowflake Method for plotting. Last week I started with a one-sentence "elevator pitch" for the book, and expanded that into a paragraph of five sentences, making sure that most of them ended with some sort of complication. Today I took that paragraph and expanded each sentence into its own paragraph, detailing the progression from start to finish in more detail. I then broke out each sentence of those paragraphs and numbered them. These were the building blocks for each chapter.

I then spent a couple of hours putting everything into yWriter. (For those of you familiar with yWriter, I have one "scene" per "chapter" -- I want lots of short chapters for this, so it makes the most sense structurally in the software.) I used the sentence I wrote for the chapter as the chapter's description. Each scene also asked for a goal, a conflict, and a resolution, which I filled out based on what I had in mind. This lead to some restructuring of my chapters, which I did on the fly as it made sense (and I fully expect I'll do again as the book comes along). yWriter also asks which characters are in which scenes, which forced me to start fleshing out which characters+ I'll need for the story.

I approached the novel as a straight-forward adventure story. Most of the comedy I like usually comes from entertaining writing and scenes, not from a zany plot, so I wrangled my plotting as if I were writing a legitimate vampire hunter story. Besides, by plotting "straight," I don't have to worry about whether the premise is funny (since it isn't), and I think I can find some organic humor from the plot tropes of the genre as well.

In the end, I have 29 chapters roughed out. Even if I assume about two thousand words for each chapter (which would make each chapter very short), that's 58,000 words, which is well over my NaNoWriMo goal. I think it's likely the book will end up being longer than that, though, so expect I'll be talking about this well into December. Part of what leads me into thinking this will go long is because I have 13 named characters at this point (although, to be fair, one is a pug dog).

If I have time later this week, I'll start fleshing out details on the characters to make them all unique and interesting (and funny, of course). In the meantime, I'm excited about working on this!

I looked over the poll results, and I did a lot of thinking about what I really want to write. (I even added a novel idea that I forgot about, got attached to it for a while, and then ultimately cut it.) Ultimately, I told myself that there's a decent chance that all of those will get written at some point, so I just had to decide what I really wanted to live with right now for a month straight.

The Bureau wasn't particularly popular, and I just spent a couple of weeks working on a superhero RPG anyway, so I cut that pretty quickly.

Writing two projects at the same time means I should probably diversify, or else I'll get sick of writing horror/mystery after November, which isn't fair to Whitechapel. That meant cutting As The Devil Drives and Do The Job (which was the professional wrestling/murder mystery idea I remembered after I posted last night).

Thy Kingdom Come was surprisingly popular (both in the poll and to me personally), but references to steampunk actually decided it for me. TKC was an idea I had long before the steampunk craze came along, because I love 19th century literature. However, I'm kind of sick of steampunk right now, and a check of my gut made me go "blech" when thinking about it. I do want to write that book at some point (maybe even next year), but I'm just not in the brainspace to do that now. If I were freelancing, I'd suck it up and deal with it, but since I'm primarily writing this for me, I gave myself a pass.

Besides -- I think I really want to stretch my skills and try comedy. And that pretty much narrowed the field to Terrifying Disappointment and Night Fall.

Both have some characters I'm intrigued by. Both have some rough basics of the background sketched out. Both have some vague plots in my head. And both have huge gaps of personal knowledge that terrify me. It's a balance of comfort and fear that's probably good for me.

Thanks to everyone who gave me their thoughts on this. Now I have to push this to the back of my head, read up on a couple of things, and lay the groundwork for next week, so I can make a decision and (if I decide I'm crazy enough to do this), start outlining and researching after my surgery.

Between encouragement (well, mocking) from my family and a few people at work keen on the idea, I'm seriously considering giving National Novel Writing Month a try this year. Which means I have to start outlining... well, now.

I've actually wanted to try NaNoWriMo for about five years now, but I've never had a chance to. This year I actually do, and I have the energy for it as well -- Whitechapel has really gotten me excited about writing longer pieces of fiction. While I've written whole books before, I haven't ever even tackled a novel before, so this will be totally new to me.

That isn't to say that I haven't had ideas for novels all this time. In fact, I've had several. I've managed to narrow it down to five that I have interest in and notes for, but I'm having a hard time choosing, so I wanted to see what y'all thought. I won't necessarily go with the most popular option -- it might be that I look at that option and go "Ugh," which means that I really had my heart set on another idea and didn't realize it -- but it will help me boil my options down to one. Here are the "elevator pitches" for each, and any pros or cons against them.

• As The Devil Drives: A demon-possessed mobster runs afoul of a washed-up detective who has seen things most people won't believe. (Horror detective fiction) This is actually a novel I wrote a chapter or two on a while back, but I could never get moving on it. In feel it would be pretty close to Whitechapel, which means I might want to consider something a little different to change it up.
• Night Fall: A witty female vampire hunter gets caught up in the society of the local undead who are all idiots. (Comedic modern fantasy) This is actually what started the idea of NaNoWriMo going -- a parody of various female vampire hunter novels out there. Of course, this is pretty close to what I do for a living, so it's got a similar strike against it as "As The Devil Drives" in terms of mood overlap.
• Terrifying Disappointment: The salvage crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment find that they are the only hope left in their sector of space against an alien menace. (Comedic sci-fi) I've been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi recently, so this idea is pretty fresh to me, but it would be two genres I've never done before.
  
• The Bureau: A group of empowered individuals work together in secret to defeat a race of dimensional creatures from taking over the world. (Modern pulp superheroes) This is a pretty old idea that I've been poking at again recently. I like the idea, but I'm not entirely sure if it's a novel or something else.
• Thy Kingdom Come: The War of Heaven comes to Earth in the late 19th century. (Dramatic alt history) Another old idea, and not something I've worked on recently, but I did a lot of research a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure I still have all those notes somewhere.

So, if you have a second, click on the titles you think are interesting/would be interesting for me to write/think I would have fun writing. You can choose as many as you want -- again, I'm not looking for hard data, but just collecting some random opinions to give me something to mull over and help me narrow these choices down.

(Note: Poll is not working for some, so if you can't vote, just toss your thoughts in a comment, tweet them to me on Twitter, or email me.)


Poll #1470098 What book should I write?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

What book should I write for NaNoWriMo?

"Where do you get your ideas from?"

It's actually not a question I get a whole lot anymore. Maybe it's because people are starting to realize that it's become the most cliche thing you can say to a writer, or maybe it's because I tend to be known for working on licensed or collaborative products, and people assume I just don't have any ideas of my own. Anyhow, while I don't get questioned about it a lot, people certainly still seem confused by my relationship with the writing process.

As an example, last week I was at a LARP, but spent nearly two hours out of the game. Instead, I was sequestered in the tiny kitchen of the game site, scribbling ideas for a new RPG system furiously in my notebook and testing them out with playing cards and character sheets scratched out on the back of my own. Last night I sat down to just jot down a few ideas, and next thing I knew it was 1 in the morning, and the rest of my family was already off in bed.

I can see why people used to think that creativity came from a spirit or demon -- there are a lot of times when I feel an idea possesses me rather than gets created by me. Of course, it's still a lot of really hard work to get that idea from something rattling around in my head to something that can be seen, but sometimes the idea just sits in the front of my brain and will just poke at me until I sit the fuck down and do something about it. The interesting part is that the more I work on it, the more that other projects jump up and demand to be worked on as well. And when I get into a steady rhythm of writing daily, I find it harder and harder not to write daily. (This is why the first piece of writing advice you'll probably ever get is "Write every day.")

Let me give you a peek into the various projects I've been working on over the past few weeks. Note that this is all outside of my work writing:

• An RPG system based around teams of criminals put together for heists and con jobs
• Another RPG system (this time for superheroes) that's a mash-up between Fudge and 4C (which started as just some house rules for a potential Nextwave campaign)
• A superhero universe I've kicked around for years that might be part of said RPG, or might be used somewhere else
• Whitechapel episodes and promotion
• "Gloomy Sunday," the short story for the Close Encounters of the Urban Kind anthology
• More brainstorming for Katrina Night, my comedic vampire bad girl fiction (which, if I lose my damned mind, I might use for NaNoWriMo this year)
• A space opera universe (featuring the crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment) that I briefly considered as an audio drama

Odds are pretty good that only a couple of these will actually see the light of day -- some of these are old projects that have been sitting on my hard drive for years, and there's easily another dozen or two projects to keep them company. But on the other hand, Whitechapel was one of those projects, and it's finally out and getting people excited, so maybe some day a few of these will be out in the open.

Whatever. The point is, my muse is trying to kill me. But what a way to go.

Before I start, I need a moment.

Ahem.

HOLY FUCKING CHRIST I'M GOING TO BE PUBLISHED IN A FICTION ANTHOLOGY.

Whew. There. Now that that's out of my system, "Gloomy Sunday" has been confirmed as one of the stories in the upcoming Close Encounters of the Urban Kind by Apex Publishing. This is awesome for a couple of reasons: it's only the second time I've been paid for my straight fiction (the first was "Questions" for the Pseudopod podcast), and it's the first time I've been invited into an anthology instead of blindly submitting a story for consideration. I have a chance to do a polish and reformatting pass before the editor gives me redlines. And then, at some point in the future, the awesome happens.

But no time to slow down. I've been chugging along on Whitechapel, and I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out. I've been babbling about my writing process on that project quite a bit -- you can check out my post-mortems if you're interested.

And because my brain doesn't have enough going on, I've been poking around with an older project for the past few days -- a weird kind of pulp superhero universe. It's something I've kicked around for a few years now, but it's been intermingled with some other projects in my head, and I'm in the process of slowly extracting them so I can focus on fleshing out those elements. Originally I had a few different OpenOffice documents that I was trying to keep notes in, but it was hard to keep track of all the interconnections, so I'm now putting all my notes into a TiddlyWiki page. My time running a Scion cycle on Obsidian Portal has helped me to think of ways to use a wiki for cross-referencing world information and characters. Of course, I don't have any plans to work on comic scripts or a superhero RPG, so I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with it just yet, but I'm sure I'll have some fun with it at some point.

About three months ago, I waxed poetic about how Google Docs were becoming an important part of my writing process.

Last night, I told Google Docs that I need to start seeing other people.

Don't get me wrong -- the idea of a robust online word processor appeals to me immensely. However, the main advantage it had was that it was available at both my work and home computer, and I could easily update in either place. I thought that all I needed was something that was more than Notepad but less than OpenOffice, and Google Docs seemed to be that.

But as I started using it more heavily, I began to notice problems. For some reason, OpenOffice exports from Google Docs are badly formatted: they always have the right margin at 0% (though the other margins are fine), and it assumes your default language is Russian. Correcting and reuploading the document doesn't change this problem, so everytime I get a fresh document I have to reformat it. I thought it was a problem with OpenOffice, but it happened on other computers as well.

Plus, it's not as simple as it lets on. There's still bits of code stuck in the documents. When I use highlighting, I can't turn it back off -- I can only turn it to white. But that white highlighting does carry over when you copy and paste it into WordPress. It even shows up on paper (very, very slightly).

Organizing documents is a bear sometimes, too. Even if I have it all tagged and foldered, sometimes Google stays stuck on the master list of all documents sorted by time updated, so I still have to wade around a bit. It's kind of nice to be able to tag documents into multiple "folders," but in the past three months I haven't had a need for that feature once.

Gears doesn't always work, either. A document I updated three weeks ago is still listed as "updated offline," even though I synced it three times. Which means I would be forced to use it only when I have an Internet connection, which is just not feasible. And Google isn't always available.

(As a side note, I briefly looked in Zoho, but when it took five minutes to export a document, I gave up before I started.)

The solution I now have is pretty simple: I have my entire writing folder on Dropbox. I don't anticipate I'll be doing any meaningful writing on a foreign computer (and if I do, Google Docs will work in a pinch), but Dropbox is installed on all of the computers I do use regularly, and will sync files between my computers each time I boot up, so my files are always up-to-date on each. If I'm offline, the files are still there, so I can still work on them -- they're not hosted in a cloud. And Dropbox and OpenOffice are both still free.

Further, I found out that OpenOffice can turn off a lot of functions to give it a simpler experience, so I can free-write for a while, and then turn things on and do heavy editing without worrying if Google Docs will actually GIVE me my fucking file this time.

It was fun, Google Docs, but I think you need to mature a bit before we could look at any kind of serious relationship.

So on Sunday I got a weird idea to make a small computer game. There are tons of free options to make a variety of computer games, and I figure since I work for a video game company, I should learn something about the process. However, I'm not a programmer nor an artist, so my options quickly got whittled down. I was about to toss out the idea as just a lark when I stumbled across Inform 7.

Now, I'm no stranger to text adventures (or as they're known as now, "interactive fiction"), both when they originally popular and the resurgence of innovation in the medium in the 90s and early 21st century. I fell out of touch with it around the time I started seriously freelancing, so I missed the release of software that lets you program IF games in English.

PROGRAM IN ENGLISH.

I have been obsessed with this ever since. As I dig into it, it's not nearly as magical as it first seemed -- getting the software to do things like combat requires some heavy coding (or "rules creation" in Inform terms) -- but there's also an active community of people who create extensions Firefox-style that you can plug into a game. The only downside so far is that they're usually pretty hefty (for a word game -- 256k is actually a meaningful amount of space), but for what I'm doing, that's fine for now.

After going from pointless and random noodling to wanting to making something cohesive, I decided that a wacky pulp story would work well with an unambitious text adventure, so I dusted off my old friend Agent Patriot and started working on an actual adventure. In three days, he hasn't left his office, but I'm building a lot of the infrastructure.

I can't entirely explain why this appeals to me so much. I've written a bit for EVE Online, as well as another MMO project, and I've learned that writing for a video game is very different from both fiction and RPG writing. Playing with Inform 7, I'm getting a lot of that same vibe that I did working on those projects. The big difference for me is that I can compile the program and see my results right away, so I can modify and stretch the story as needed based on the limitations of my software or my knowledge.

But this does lead to situations like last night, when I stayed up until past midnight trying to keep a character from continuing to clean Agent Patriot's office after he died. I finally figured it out, only to realize that it didn't matter -- the game probably shouldn't continue if that character died anyhow. But that work isn't thrown out, because I learned a LOT about how to construct similar situations in future, and I've increased my options for later story development.

(I admit that I just cheated and got a combat plug-in. It works almost exactly how I wanted it to, so it was a LOT of work I just didn't need to do.)

I've always liked writing fiction to tell a certain story, and I've always liked writing and running RPGs to let others tell a story as well. But somewhere in the middle there's a range of collaboration between writer and audience that I want to explore more. This is one avenue -- I have another one kicking around as well (the elusive "Whitechapel" idea I've mentioned) that I want to wait until we've moved before I pursue further. And emprint has shown me a third avenue that I like as well. Maybe we should collaborate on a project at some point.

This does mean that my original idea of trying to get back and committing to daily wordcounts is kind of shot, but I think this is all valuable work to improve my skills as a writer overall. As technology continues to evolve, I think there's going to be new ways to close the gap between writer and audience, and I can't see how that kind of interaction will do anything but help me to become a better writer overall.

I've been trying to force myself to write 2,500 words of personal writing a week (approximately 500 words a weeknight). It took a while to get back into the groove, but this week I managed to take some serious swings at "Gloomy Sunday," a short story I'm working on for possible inclusion in an upcoming anthology. I think I'll probably have to end up rewriting some of it to get it closer to the proposed theme of the anthology, but at this stage I'm just writing to get to the end.

I've also been laying the groundwork for another fiction project called The Whitechapel Project, of which I'll have more information once we get moved and settled.

Finally, I got an older story ("Bete Noire") workshopped by oakthorne and emprint, and there's only a couple minor things I need to tweak before I can consider that done and start shopping it around.

Interestingly, my writing process has evolved again. I started "Gloomy Sunday" as I usually do, by putting down the rough plot skeleton and doing the major research before I started with word one. (I also waited until I had a good opening before I started, which is a terrible habit, but I'm still working on that one.) As I started writing, though, the story started to deviate off course. Rather than force it back on track, I'm just following it to see where it goes. I think in the end the beginning and the end will be mostly the same -- only the middle will be significantly different. It's weird writing off of an outline, but it's always good to push yourself.

A few years ago, when I was working on personal projects as well as freelance writing, I found that I needed to write out a zero draft in a journal before I could compose my thoughts into Word. Then I got the job to work on Mind's Eye Theatre: The Awakening, and from there I got hired by CCP, so I haven't had time to use a journal to compose drafts (though I do use it for taking notes and initial brainstorming a lot).

As I started working on a short story, I did some initial writing in a journal, but it ended up not working out -- it's just too slow after years of doing everything with a computer now. But using Microsoft Word is firmly equated with "work" in my mind now, so I was looking for something that was had a few more features than Notepad, but got out of the way more than Word.

I tried using OpenOffice, partially because it's very Word-like, partially because I'm familiar with it, partially because it's free, and partially because there's a plug-in that allows you to quickly upload and download to Google Docs for backup. But as I started getting ideas for "Get Over," I wasn't at my home laptop, so I composed my initial ideas in Google Docs with the intention of importing them later into OpenOffice. And next thing I knew, I had written most of the first essay in it. I quickly plowed through the next two over the course of the week. I also found it was easy to dump footnotes into the essays as people brought up other pieces of information.

Then I started dumping information for the nextWAVE game into a Google Doc. And now I've continued working on the short story in Google Docs directly, as well as starting to do some initial planning for another project in a Google Doc. And I discovered that it works with Google Gears, so I don't have to be online to access my latest work (at least on my home laptop).

For some reason, Google Docs hits a sweet spot with me in terms of the creative process. I'm expecting that once I get to the heavy rewrite phase I'll pull it into OpenOffice or Word, which not only helps me to see it a little differently, but also is more full-featured and fits into the "editor" space in my head better. I still expect I'll use notebooks to jot down short scenes, brainstorming, ideas and plotting ideas, but I'm moving more and more toward working entirely within my computer creatively.

This might seem like a "duh" moment to some (I know emprint, for example, has been using Google Docs this way for years), but it was an interesting revelation for me as someone who used to really worship paper and journals to find that I'm getting more comfortable with creating inside a computer environment as I grow older.

Of course, between this and moving many of my RSS feeds to Google Reader, this means that Google owns more of my soul.

It's been a while, so let me catch up.

Car and Internet: Last week I switched Michelle's SmartCar for my Mazda 6 again to commute to and from work. Friday after work the Check Engine light came on, but I was able to get the car back home. Saturday morning, the car refused to start. Since we had just replaced the battery, it clearly had to be something else, so we had to have it towed to the dealership. It didn't get looked at until today, and they want to keep it overnight to make sure that it's working right (apparently a pin in an electrical switch was loose).

So I worked from home today -- since Mondays are usually just taking care of my administrative stuff, it's easy enough to do from home, but I need a steady VPN connection to access the Exchange server and the company intranet sites. So, naturally, our Comcast connection crapped out around 3:30pm today, not coming back until several hours later. I had a couple of things I could do offline, but it means that some things I wanted to get done today I have to do tomorrow instead, and I'll have to work those around picking up a car at some point tomorrow.

Writing: Aside from my White Wolf work, I'm taking more steps toward more personal writing. oakthorne, emprint and I are going to start a small writing critique group to workshop each other's writing. I'm looking forward to it -- we all know each other's writing, we've all developed for each other and we've all had lengthy conversations about style, so it should be very helpful. I got oakthorne's first couple of chapters to read over.

Reading: As my 50-hour weeks have finally died down, I've been taking more time to read. If you haven't found it already, I've been keeping track of my reading list on Goodreads.com.

The most significant recent book I've read, though, was A Game of Thrones. I haven't read any of the Song of Ice and Fire series before, but I've had a number of friends recommend the series to me over the year. The weird thing is, I'm actually not a big fan of epic fantasy -- I was always more of a horror and sci-fi kid growing up, and long books with dozens of characters all doing the same thing over and over just bore me. However, some co-workers made some compelling arguments, and I agreed to borrow the books and tried them out. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised, and once I can borrow the next book I'll check that out as well.

I'm also two-thirds of the way through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is everything I expected it would be, with the addition of ninjas.

Video Games: I have slowly working through my second time playing Fallout 3 -- this time, picking up as many side quests as I can and exploring as much as possible. I can't find out where to determine specifically how long I've been playing, but I'm pretty sure it's around twenty hours right now. I'm also poking at Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, which I picked up in a Sherlock Holmes package for $20 at Best Buy. It's a bit simpler than I thought, but otherwise not bad. (Which reminds me -- I need to snag a copy of Shadows Over Baker Street some day....)

I am trying very, very hard to resist the urge to take a Sherlock Holmes story and a Lovecraft story and mash them together a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Jonathan Coulton: Went to the Jonathan Coulton concert on Saturday. It was three and a half hours of pure awesome, and probably the best $20 I've spent on live entertainment in a while. The opening act was Paul and Storm, whom I had never experienced before, but they're definitely a group I'm going to check out. Also, just noticed that the three of them have put out a RiffTrax for Tron.

That should be enough to tide y'all over for a bit.

It seems that I do my best work establishing the foundation of my writing projects when I endless obsess on something while getting lost in inspirational material. Even though I had a digression of poking at my mid-20th century material for Mosaic (revising and fleshing out a team of characters from that time), I actually got some good groundwork for my short story for "Close Encounters of the Urban Kind." And, even though I didn't plan it this way, it actually fits into the Mosaic world. Of course, if I need to break connections with Mosaic to make a good, salable story, they'll go, but it's nice to have a comfortable basis to start the story from.

I hashed out a first draft plot skeleton for the story[1]. It's not working out as a straight mystery, but since I'm already mixing sci-fi and urban legends together, I let myself off on cleaving too much to a third genre's tropes. Instead, an investigation is the frame for the story, but it's not a mystery[2]. I'm a little concerned that even though it's a straight-forward plot that the nuances will push me over 7,000 words, but that just means I'll have plenty of material to prune, boiling the story down to just the awesomeness it needs to tell the story. I'm going to do a little more reading and let the plot stew in my head for a bit, and maybe next weekend I'll start hammering on a zero draft[3].

---

Footnote 1: In the past I've tried just writing and seeing where the words take me, but I end up not writing anything because I have no idea where I'm going, so I'm definitely an outline kind of guy. I sometimes wish I WAS the kind of person who could just write without a roadmap, honestly.

Footnote 2: It won't have false clues, lots of suspects, etc. Though I think if I were to flesh this out beyond 7,000 words I could probably make it into a mystery, but I don't need to be writing novellas right now.

Footnote 3: A "zero draft" is something I came up with a while back on some earlier writing projects. Basically after I figure out an outline, I write a draft that's something between an elaborate outline and a full draft -- I'll write out a lot of "this happens and then this happens," with bits of scenes that pop into my head as I think of them. I'll also usually do that longhand, because that forces me to keep going forward instead of dickering with minor details -- the point of the zero draft is to put some meat on the skeleton, not to worry about how pretty it looks. If the zero draft seems to inspire more ideas than disgust, I'll type it up (usually doing a lot of heavy revision at the same time) into a full first draft.

Thanks to everyone who voted in my poll, and who took the time to comment. I looked not only at the numbers, but also who said what. I also looked at my existing sites as well as upcoming ones, and found that "eddywebb" is more commonly taken than "eddyfate," so it's actually hard to move key sites. Other key sites like Facebook and Goodreads pretty much ignore my login and put everything under my real name anyhow, so the point is moot in those cases.

Further, I don't want to work under a pen name. It's kind of interesting to realize that "Eddy Fate" actually has some basis as a real name, but the hassles of a pen name don't outweight the benefits of working under my real name. Plus, I would lose the seven years of brand equity I've developed under the name "Eddy Webb."

(Interesting side note: At one point I was going to market my fiction under "Edward Webb" and my RPG work under "Eddy Webb," which is why my Pseudopod story is under "Edward Webb." The reasons for that decision now escape me. I think it was to do with some half-baked idea to separate my "serious" writing from my "hobby" writing.)

As such, the key audience I'm trying to attract are those who might want to follow me but aren't aware that eddyfate = Eddy Webb. So it looks like I'm going to have to consider it on a site-by-site basis going forward. I am making changes to make my existing accounts more explicit where I can (like changing the title of my LiveJournal to include my real name), and I'm considering a personal web page to market myself through and reinforce the Eddy Webb/eddyfate connection to sites like Google. Since a number of people just Google people's names and user names, if I reinforce that connection enough in the search engines, that should get the majority of my potential audience to make the connection for existing sites. Then I can make more tactical and relevant choices for future sites.

For anyone thinking about being an aspiring writer, this kind of critical self-marketing thought is actually incredibly important, especially in an increasingly online age. (In fact, easily a quarter of the people who responded to my poll were writers.)

I rewrote three of my old stories, partially to fit within Mosaic but mostly because it's been a few years and they needed a rewrite. In the course of that, I was invited to submit for an upcoming fiction anthology. The theme is a collection of stories that blend urban legends and alien encounters, past or the present day, generally dark. 1-7k, due in September.

Poking at Mosaic has been helping me get my fiction writing skills limbered up again. For those who don't know, writing isn't just writing -- the skills and mindset that go into RPG writing are different from fiction writing, which is why people who can do both well are amazing finds. Not only have I not written fiction on any consistent basis for over five years, but I haven't written it pretty much at all for two. However, I did some initial brainstorming over the weekend, and I already have a few ideas. (Withhold your intense shock when I reveal that I'm debating a hard-boiled detective story for my submission.)

So I'm definitely moving back into writing fiction in my off-time, especially now that my insane block of travel is done with for this year (I still have some travel later, but it's not nearly as intense as the past few months were).

I've been thinking about my flash piece "Questions" again recently, and I was pleased to find that the podcast version is still online. I don't know why my brain keeps circling around a piece of mine that's several years old, though.

Transcribed from this, posted by elissa_carey. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with all of these points -- points 2, 6 and 9, for example, seem to devalue professional artists and the entire concept of freelancing. Other points, however, are extremely good. What do y'all think?

How to Feel Miserable as an Artist

(Or what not to do)

1. Constantly compare yourself to other artists.

2. Talk to your family about what you do and expect them to cheer you on.

3. Base the success of your entire career on one project.

4. Stick with what you know.

5. Undervalue your expertise.

6. Let money dictate what you do.

7. Bow to societal pressures.

8. Only do work that your family would love.

9. Do whatever the client/customer/gallery owner/patron/investor asks.

10. Set unachievable/overwhelming goals. To be accomplished by tomorrow.

The past week have been a bit like a cartoon coyote: I've been running so hard and so fast that I didn't realize the ground wasn't under me until just now. I conceptually knew it was Friday, but it didn't really sink in that that means it's the end of the week until just now. I've been juggling my usual post-con workload combined with bad planning on my part and a temporary increase in my work responsibilities (which involves playing video games, so I can't complain) while struggling with a mild cold or allergy or something, so it's all been a bit of a blur. Let me catch up on a few things:

* Cruise went well. I had a better time than I anticipated I would, but unfortunately I didn't get to see too much of Mexico, as I had work obligations to fulfill. I did get sick near the end of the trip, but I got over it pretty quick, so I'm not sure if it was sea-sickness, my usual vertigo combined with the rocking of the ship or just something I ate. My biggest regret was having to bail out on a LARP theory roundtable on Friday night to talk over "Killing Sacred Cows" because of said illness. I still end up being a little anti-social on these kinds of trips because I miss my family, and this was a particularly long one, but from an objective (i.e., me not being a whiny bitch) level it was a good time.

* Recently I've been really hooked on the Rain-Slick Precipice games. I didn't expect to like them, but it seems to hit a sweet spot with me between old-school computer RPGs, fast reflexes, inside jokes from a variety of sources, and just plain adolescent vulgarity. The Xbox version of episode two seems a little glitchier than episode one was on the PS3, but when I'm not playing video games for work, I'm pretty obsessed with these right now. (Especially since I'm stuck as hell on Gears of War 1.)

* Finished Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman while I was on the cruise. It was recommended to me after my review of Playing For Keeps (buy it buy it buy it buy it), and there's certainly a similar vibe here, down to a very prominent hero not making an appearance until late in the book. It loses focus a few times, and there are some plot elements that don't seem to be adequately wrapped up, but it was a fun read on the Kindle, and worth picking up if you like superhero fiction.

* Speaking of media, check out the Scam School video podcast. It's tagline is "social engineering in the bar and on the street," and it's a surprisingly entertaining look at card tricks, bar puzzles and other kinds of party jokes. Some of this stuff isn't new to me, but seeing people's reactions and hearing how the various elements are designed to "socially engineer" the audience is fascinating.

* In my gaming life, my new Requiem PC G.T. is settling in nicely. I accomplished my core goal of having a new PC that has lots of reasons to attend the Atlanta game, and a side benefit of getting some decent global play going with him. It's also been entertaining to try to re-learn a game I know very well just from other players. Meanwhile, the victorian age Mage tabletop game is being scrapped and replaced with a modern Mage tabletop game. I have a couple of ideas for characters. I've also been consistently smacking down the urge to run a game of my own.

* I've also been consistently smacking down the urge to write fiction again. Just when I think I have time to spend maybe an hour a week poking at some fiction, something happens to suck up my free time. I know that if it gets too bad I can just re-prioritize and give myself the time to write, but at the moment I've convinced myself that I don't have the time, and that seems to be keeping the muse at bay somewhat. Part of the problem is that I don't know WHAT I want to write -- every time I see a good movie or listen to a good podcast or read a good book, I want to write, but it's a different idea each time. I have about fifteen million worlds kicking around in my head, but I haven't sat down and worked on compelling characters or interesting stories yet. (Part of the problem is that when I DO get a neat story or character idea, I can find more immediate use for that at work.)

For years my RPG work resume has been out of date, as I had been linking to pen-paper.net. I just found out today that RPG.net has a much more comprehensive RPG index, and my writing resume is completely up-to-date on there. Voila!

My RPG writing career to date.

That doesn't include books I've developed or edited -- just written for. Still, that's the list most people ask for anyhow, so there it is.

Ring! Ring! Ring! In Japan, Novelists Find a New Medium

Ahh, so that's what the age gap feels like. Now I understand why adults used to look at me and go "what in the hell are you thinking?"

Since I sold a flash piece to a paying market, I decided to spend a few hours today doing more of the same. I polished an older space opera piece ("The Battlefield") for consideration at another podcast, and I trimmed down "Questions" to 720 words to be eligible for print in a horror flash fiction anthology (since I only sold one-time audio rights to Pseudopod, not print rights). I'll hopefully know by late November how both pieces will do - it would be nice to have a total of three fiction sales!

I also have some other short story ideas kicking around:

Shadowrun: I'm kicking around the idea of writing a short fiction piece to help me get immersed in the world. I actually had a couple of ideas from Midway City that translate well into SR4, but I don't know yet how (or if) I want to approach it.

The Bureau: I am blocked on When The Devil Drives, pure and simple. I had an idea of writing a short story after the events of WTDD, to help me get a feel for all of the characters, as well as to ease me into the world of The Bureau better than attempting to write what is functionally a novel on the first go.

Hero Pulp: I occasionally kick around ideas for a pulp story set in the 1930s. It actually stems from an abandoned idea that actually explains where my old Requiem character got the name Nick Ebon. A couple of paying markets have cropped up that cater to this style of story, which is why I continue to toy with it. I also want to see how the Lester Dent Master Pulp Plot outline works in practice. ;)

The nice thing about considering some short story ideas is that it's longer than flash fiction, but it's not such a huge commitment that I can't drop it if some paying RPG work comes along. Odds are that only two of the three ideas above are salable in the short term, but all of them look fun to write, which is the ultimate point of working on them.