Archive for the ‘Writing Updates’ Category

Bonus Short Story for KATJA completed

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Just finished the very final revision (pre-editing, anyway) of FKU, the bonus short story which will feature in the special-with-a-capital-S hardcover edition of KATJA FROM THE PUNK BAND so that has now been handed over to Brett Savory over at ChiZine.

Clocked in at just under 8K which was longer than I’d originally intended but I added in a few more layers and scenes during the last week which I hope flesh out the story a little more.  Hopefully it’ll be a worthwhile bonus for those of you who have bought it.

In other news I used the website www.random.org to randomly generate the number of the order of the hardcover which will win the signed Russian edition of IO – details will follow shortly on who exactly that lucky, lucky person is!

Missed out on your chance to pre-order before the January 31st deadline?  Then why not pre-order the trade paperback edition now available from Amazon.com and others.  (It doesn’t have the bonus short story and soundtrack listing but it does have 220 pages of Logan loveliness!)

Stories With Meaning

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Having been working on my story for the proposed SHINE anthology tonight (finally!) it’s got me thinking about the powers and pitfalls of writing stories with an intentional message in them.

The anthology, to be edited by Jetse DeVries, is looking for uplifting, positive scifi stories which once I’d seen the specs for the antho I realised were quite rare.  Jetse is wanting writers to give the readers reason to feel positive from their stories and so I quickly formulated an idea about an massive information source that could become available to everybody in the future, allowing them all to access the same sea of information directly without that information being mediated by anyone.

To me, freedom of information is one of the most vital things to us going into the future - more so than energy, political freedom or anything else.  Without access to information we can be as free to choose as we please but if we don’t know enough to inform those choices then what good is it?  This is why I can’t bear to listen to most radio phone in shows - because they just want people’s opinion and don’t differentiate between informed and uninformed opinion.  Should people who are uninformed on a subject be allowed to have and express an opinion on that subject?  Of course - but it should be qualified (or discounted) by the fact that they might not fully understand what it is they are having an opinion on and if that is the case of what value IS that opinion?

But writing the story does raise the issue that writers have to be very careful with when they are writing stories with a message, a purpose, and that is to not step over the bounds into being preachy.  It’s important to make your point, of course, but I think in order to properly appeal to readers it has to do so in a subtle way, quietly opening their minds rather than shouting it at them.  If you shout it, those who already agree just nod as they would anyway but those who don’t might be put off.  If you’re more subtle about it, however, then you might win over some people - and if the purpose of the story was to make a point then ideally you’d want to have the readers ending up agreeing with you.

The difficulty is, of course, that as a writer you have to judge how much is too much and how much is too little.  Sometimes you can be too subtle because you know things that don’t make it into the story and this can distort your view of the story itself - you think that you’ve imparted some piece of information because, of course, you know the full spread of the story, even the bits that didn’t make it in and the risk is that you think that something is in there when it actually isn’t.  Then the opposite can also be true - you want to make sure you get a certain point across so make it several times but forget that most readers are smart enough to pick up the subtleties of stories.  Finding that balance - well I guess that’s where the craft lies.

So the first draft is done and I’m going to leave it a couple of days before taking another look and polishing it up.  As it stands I think it needs toned down and changed in places and since it’s only 3.6K (and the upper word limit is 10K, though obviously this close to the deadline a lot of the wordspace might have already been filled up and so shorter stories might be more likely to make it in) there’s room to maneovre.

One of the prime offenders of willfull manipulation of information

GUERRA 1st Draft almost done

Friday, June 26th, 2009

I finished writing the last scene I had to go back and do in GUERRA last night so what I need to do is basically go through it all once more and possibly minorly redo some scenes and tweak in places.

I have built up an edit list for the second draft whilst still working on the first, mainly because I prefer to stick to the method of not going back and editing whilst still working on a draft unless it is something major that will mean that I will have to undo it all - it helps me keep up my momentum and I am able to juggle the bits that I’m writing whilst also knowing that they could change.  With that said there are some minor things I’d like to do (including rewriting the first chapter which starts at the end and now that I’ve written the end and know how it goes I can synchronise the two) before saying that the first draft is done.  The rest of it I’ll leave for a few weeks then come back and start on the second draft which is usually my final draft apart from small edits here and there.

I don’t think there’s anything major needing done but then again once I start reading through it all I might change my mind.  For the most part it’ll be a case of making it all more subtle and taking out any repetitive stuff.  Writing something over the course of a couple of years means that you don’t really have the same sense of it as you do when you read it back over a few nights so no doubt there’ll be more work in there.

I might even consider opening it up to Beta readers though I doubt it …


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