By Susan on July 27, 2010
Haven’t been posting for a while. Social and professional obligations are mostly why, with the addition of considerable amounts of writing (well I didn’t call this blog “The Joy of Golf”, did I?) Funny, sometimes the more engaged I am the less I feel like talking about engagement. One of those paradoxes of life, I suppose.
I wanted to talk about libel – or as it’s known now in Irish law, “defamation”, so we don’t need to keep making that tedious distinction between libel (defamation that is published) and slander (defamation that is spoken)
Defamation is defined as “A statement that tends to injure a person’s reputation in the eyes of reasonable members of society”. Continue reading “The Laws of Libel”
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By Susan on July 19, 2010
over at her blog, The Creative Identity, discussing the entries for her recent competition. Her wrath is truly awe-inspiring, but do pay attention because as she says, “I won’t bin your story for this, but agents and publishers WILL”. The bit about the printer had me in stitches.
So, don’t do any of this stuff (though I would forgive the contestant who left their coffee mug on their MS)
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By Susan on July 13, 2010
I have just received a note from the editor of Nature Futures, the science-fiction-publishing arm of Nature Magazine to tell me that my story “Stay Special” has been accepted for publication therein.
I am delighted at this because I know from people in the science world that this is quite a prestigious publication. I will provide more information on this once the agreements have been ironed out. Just as a note to potential submitters, I found them courteous and friendly, with good response times.
Posted in personal
By Susan on July 11, 2010
Please note: this entry discusses adult concepts.
There’s been a lot of chat recently about bad sex. Experiences recalled include “inappropriate” things being said at particular times – some very funny, it must be said – and the unbecoming appearance of the body parts involved and perceived ineptitude at using them.
But I don’t want to talk about bad sex. I want to talk about good sex, and good writing, and how the two have a lot in common. Continue reading “Why Good Writing Is Like Good Sex”
Posted in trusting the process
By Susan on July 9, 2010
Via another online list, I was alerted to this. Salt Publishing, a well-known and well-respected publisher of short stories and poetry, are starting a romance imprint, initially with e-books and paperback to follow. There is some information here in an interview with their editor, Jane Holland; since it’s necessary to scroll half way down the page to find it I’m reproducing it below. They are seeking novels and novellas.
Caveat: romantic fiction might be seen as light, but is not to be taken lightly. If you don’t take your characters and your theme seriously, editors will see it a mile off. If you can’t create a character you yourself could fall deeply in love with, then perhaps better not to try.
Continue reading “Salt Publishing – Seeking Romantic Fiction”
Posted in links
By Susan on July 8, 2010
Dear friends and readers, it has been a while. A while which I have spent moving house, continuing with my job and even doing some writing to the background chant of the vuvuzelas (I believe their note is B flat) and the white-haired football experts. Now I am established in a lovely house with wide windows and a quick walk to the sea and can see the sun rise over the ocean when I leave in the morning.
I might have mentioned my e-book “A Trifle” just once or twice! It is now on Barnes and Noble. As previously mentioned, I have a story coming out in Music For Another World probably sometime in August. I’m submitting like whoa to various markets. To the gentleman who enquired about Daily Science Fiction: in my experience they usually get back within two weeks. I’ve got a complimentary rejection from them of the “liked it, won’t use it” variety. Oh well, them’s the breaks.
Workshops – I have an autumn schedule of workshops coming up in the Mermaid Arts Centre in May. These were very popular when I ran them back in April – this time they are being run in the evenings, split over two weeks: one day, then the same day the following week.
I would love to end this entry with something profound and imaginative, but I think I will probably end up toddling off to bed instead.
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By Susan on June 24, 2010
Passing stranger or long-time follower, whichever you be – pause in your journey, make a little stay here, sit down and tell me your joys. Lurkers, back-button-hitters, accidental surfers, from Ireland and England, Denmark and Bangladesh, California and Arabia.
I see such fascinating little sepia-toned vignettes on my stat-counter: “the hopeless joy”, “the difficult joy” and “here’s me eating tony” and sometimes I think I would love to know more about these people, what they are thinking about, what cereal they eat at breakfast time – though of course eating cereal at breakfast is a rather Western habit.
So tell me your joys – or sorrows even, but joys is good.
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By Susan on June 20, 2010
I was at a literary gathering about a month or two ago and had just decamped to the pub with a group of others. I fell into conversation with one of the few non-poets in the pub – he turned out to be a fellow programmer so we had some common topics of discussion I won’t geek-bore the rest of you with. He happened to mention he knew someone who had difficulty writing essays and I replied without thinking, “She needs the Rule of Three”.
When questioned about this Rule, I explained that when exposing an argument, one need to have an introduction, three points for the argument in question, and a conclusion. Afterwards, I thought about it a little more and realised that the rule of three happens again and again in storytelling. When Milton’s Satan is about to give his big speech to the fallen angels, the poet is careful to say “Thrice he assayed” as opposed to “once” or “five times” (in which case one would wonder if Lucifer had had an unlikely case of stage fright.) When Psyche is trying to win Cupid back from his jealous mother Aphrodite, she must undergo three ordeals. The story of Goldilocks has three little bears. The human mind appears to like the pattern of three and it occurs again and again. In Japanese tradition, four is the number of death, which is obviously taking a good thing too far by adding one on to it!
So how can we apply this to a short story. Well it can be a useful structure to shoehorn in an idea – if we have max 3,000 words to play with and a single narrating character who experiences a change in the process of the story, we could have something like this:
1. Character intro, in the middle of some environment or activity, in readiness for the flow of events to occur
2. First event
3. Second event
4. Reveal
5. Final, concluding event
What is the reveal? Well, the events will be acting on some vulnerability in the character – so what makes her vulnerable. What is her backstory? How do the current events reach back to the “reveal” in the past?
Of course it is always possible to put the events in the past and the “reveal” in the present – then it would be more like a consequence of past events. In either case, the final event would be the resolution / catastrophe of the story.
This might seem a rather tight and artificial way of writing short fiction – but it does impose narrative structure on what might be an inchoate idea. If you have something kicking around and are looking for a way to get it down on paper in 3,000 words or less, the Rule of Three might help you.
Posted in trusting the process
By Susan on June 14, 2010
An interesting novel. It’s like the Pompidou centre; he declares the structure up front as he narrates. “And now as one character fades, a new character enters the scene” he announces before dragging in an Englishman who tells a story, fills up a chapter and then vanishes. I’m learning quite a lot about novel-writing just by paying attention to the meta-commentary within the narrative.
But he does one unforgivable thing. I was reading about Eduard and Charlotte and Ottilie and this character called the Captain (People in this genre tend to be referred to by their job titles, unless they’re women, since the Eternal Feminine is supposed to be drawing men upward rather than doing anything resembling a job) and reading away merrily, until at a very climactic moment in the story, Eduard goes off to summon this other guy, the Major. The what now? Who the hell is this?
It took several pages of back reading and checking up before I realised that Goethe had promoted the bloody Captain without telling me!
A tip: don’t do that. I don’t care if you are a great German Romantic poet, don’t do it. Goddamnit, I’m still cross. Captain…Major…Captain…
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By Susan on June 13, 2010
I got an email a little while ago from a reader asking how I put my e-book “A Trifle” together. I’m not sure if they got my reply or not, but I thought I might reproduce some of what I wrote in reply to them in case anyone else was planning on trying the same thing.
First, the usual caveats – please remember you are aiming for a professional work. Rigorous editing, no spelling mistakes or infelicities. Self-publishing is not a reason to be lazy. You are cultivating vanity, remember? (And this does not necessarily mean “vanity press”!) You take yourself seriously as a writer and an artist. This is a business.
(And this is where I insert a shameless plug and point to “Services” over on the right hand side – or you can bribe a friend to do it but at the very least get them a bottle of decent plonk!)
Bearing that in mind, I wrote to the reader thus:
Continue reading “How I Made My E-Book”
Posted in ebooks
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