Author: Kelly McCullough

Kelly McCullough writes fantasy, science fiction, and books for kids of varying ages. He lives in Wisconsin with his physics professor wife and a small herd of cats. His novels include Numismancer, Winter of Discontent, the WebMage and Fallen Blade series — Penguin/ACE, School for Sidekicks, Magic, Madness, and Mischief, and Spirits, Spells, and Snark — Feiwel and Friends/Macmillan. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He has Patreon and Ko-fi pages for those who are interested in supporting his work more directly. He also dabbles in science fiction as science education with The Chronicles of the Wandering Star — part of an NSF-funded science curriculum — and the science comic Hanny & the Mystery of the Voorwerp, which he co-authored and co-edited — funding provided by NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. Kelly on Twitter, Facebook, G+, ello

Good Writing Trumps Everything

The purpose of the Wyrdsmiths blog is to share what we as writers have learned with those who are interested and might benefit. Since we’ve got a pretty good publishing record collectively it’s safe to assume that we’ve learned a bit that’s worth sharing.

This often takes the form of things that sound a lot like rules or commandments, and at some time I’m even going to write a Kelly’s rules of writing post. But an important note from that is that rule one is to do whatever it takes to get you writing. If that means violating every single bit of advice we give, do it, without hesitation or concern. The writing is what it’s all about, everything else is garnish.

This includes the things we have to say about what will and won’t sell. Collectively, we’ve learned quite a lot about the business of writing. The F&SF community is a small world and one where agents and editors mingle pretty freely with writers. The tropes and conventions of the genre are often discussed (go figure).

I can say with some authority that a present tense book is going to be a harder sell than a past tense book. That in-scene POV switches will be an issue. That 150,000 words is much harder to sell than 95,000. That a book with seven protagonists will be tougher sledding than one with a single protagonist. That its easier for someone with a big name to get away with any of the above. But none of that matters as much as A) getting words on paper, and B) the quality of those words.

If writing a 150,000 word, 7 protagonist, present tense, in-scene POV switching, time-travel, cyborg, political, Southern Gothic is what really gets you to put words on the page, then get out there and start writing it. Will it be hell to sell? Absolutely. Will it sell anyway if it’s good enough? Likewise, absolutely.

Good writing trumps every marketing rule. And it trumps every other writing rule but one: Write.

Write. Write well. The rest will follow.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog Dec 04 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Notes for …And a Bottle of Rum (Aqua Vitae)

So, I thought it might be fun for my readers to get a view of the inside of my head. I’ve been working on and off on a project tentatively titled Aqua Vitae. It’s a contemporary fantasy series with six books loosely plotted out so far. I hope it will be my next group of books for adults following the Fallen Blade series which would would put it on shelves sometime around 2017. I just got back from Jamaica (setting for book six) and these are my raw notes for the book. Very little here in terms of story since that’s all established in the notes for the previous volumes. This is all about atmosphere.

Title: “…And a Bottle of Rum”

Notes on Jamaica for Aqua Vitae series

Pirates and rum runners and ganja, oh my.

August: ~90 Relentlessly hot out of the wind but not bad with sea breeze or on the beach where you can wander down and float for a bit to cool off. Bikinis everywhere. Tourists standing in the water drinking rum and pretending they’re not smoking weed. Roasted breadfruit, delicious and starchy like a natural pretzel, but pale and veined like a yellow sweet potato.

Gareth the bartender. Crystobel the desk clerk.

Old men with young girlfriends.

2010s portion of story. Ya Mon has a soft y emphasis on the A—yA Mon. Ask the bartender for whatever’s fun to make—neverending variety of different rum drinks. Hazey-dazey beach scene soaks up ambition. Hustling vendors march the beach—dressed laid back with a mellow attitude, but soaking in sweat and working their hustles hard:

“Ciiiiiigarettes—Ciiiiiigarettes—Ciiiiiigarettes!” Plastic bag of cigs

“Saahvoneers—Saahvoneers (souvenirs)” Big plastic tray—conchs

“Lobsters mon!” A couple of lobsters dipped in the ocean periodically

Quieter, friendly, “Hey Mon, need some ganja, I set you up.”

Bright colored little open boats with rods on the rails down at the edge of the resort where security can pretend to ignore them. “Fishing Mon?”

A man roars up to the edge of the sand: “Jet ski?”

Beach musicians, guitar and banjo, using an empty VHS rental container as a tip jar. Good voices, mostly old men with dreadlocks and smiles like the musicians in Mighty Quinn.

Tour guide, chatty see the real Jamaica, Appleton, Black River—certified by the tourist board. Got me a taxi with a cooler full of red stripe. Got me some skunk weed too if you want smoke. Not up for a tour? I can still get you the stink, Mon.

This gentle version is at the resort with guards and staff to police the beach. The sales are harder, pushier where there are no such watchers.

Sun so bright that you can burn in the shade just from bounce light. Hairy chest and legs SPF 10+. Sunscreen wears off and you cook, but not where the hair is, not in the shade at least. Lay on the beach, move with the shade, drink rum, wander down to waves when the shade get too hot.

All kinds of rum, sweet, spicy, sharp. White, brown, blended with coconut or banana. White rum, pineapple juice, splash of lime-deadly refreshing on a hot afternoon.

Steel drum band. Men and women. Three tops rigs with two drums each. One set of big complete oil drums (four). One regular old drum kit. Dancers doing headspins and all the stuff we eighties children think of as breakdancing, but a tropical beat.

Beach party, dancing to drums and electric guitar on the edge of the waves. Splash out to knee deep when the sweat runs too thick from dancing. Scottish step dancing surprisingly appropriate.

Walking along the interface between water and sand at sunset, waves less than ankle height, rum buzzing in your head.

The rains coming with thunder and lightning every day between 3-5 in the afternoon. Usually quick and cooling, then off, but every so often with the hint of monsoon. The boatmen stand under the tiny shelter of the the fish sanctuary sign, and bail when the rain has passed.

Feral cats live on the edge of resortland begging scraps from the tourists. The cautious hiding on the edges, the more successful, playing the loving house cat-hustling every bit as hard as the beach vendors. Compact cats—7lbs or so. Content to wait in the rain if it means they get some jerk chicken or grilled fish.

Smokers everywhere, and more black tourists than white. White folks often from Italy or Spain or points east. Lots of slavic accents. Only redhead on the beach is with me. Men with shaved heads and weightbench muscles abound. Tattoos are everywhere. The most obnoxious tourists are American, same as everywhere else.

Most tourists have a light buzz on, rum or ganja. Though some are gone by noon, really drunk drunks are rare. Maybe because the culture encourages the light buzz and demystifies alcohol and weed.

In resortland its rare to go half an hour without smelling someone light up. The weed smokers are neither furtive nor brazen, and the smell is what tells you they’re there more than behavior does.

The staff and the locals all laid back smiles. Some of that’s the job, some of it’s the culture. They work hard, but don’t rush. Handclasp or fist bump to say hello and goodbye. Everyone seems to have good teeth, often flashed in smile. When they speak amongst themselves it’s patois, fast and impossible for this outsider to parse. Braids and dyes are popular for the women—long hair mostly. Men mostly wear it short, in tiny dreads, high and tights, or low afros. Quite a few shaved heads though, and the longer dreads can be seen here and there, mostly on musicians.

Rehearsals for Jamaican dance show. Walkthrough to adjust the dance to the available space. Tights and legwarmers for heat even when its eighty out.

Sitting in the ocean during really heavy rain cold on shore, warm in the water. Rain so hard you can barely see, like spatters of sleet on my bald head. Marvelous as it was. Glorious in book form with a bottle of passed back and forth in the warm surf. Run ashore to fetch a bottle, feels like stepping into a hot bath when you splash back into the waves. Lightning overhead so loud and so close you can feel it vibrate your chest cavity like a skin and bone drum.

Tropical wedding. Groomsmen in whit linen shirts and sand pants. Groom in a sand suit. Bride in a white and sand silk mermaid that somehow works. Bridesmaids in teal, one, two, or no straps. Caribbean rock band with a teal guitar that matches the dresses. Loud obnoxious Americans who smoked and drank the week away, ruining other folks fancy dinners suddenly and briefly transformed into something marvelous as they sway down the hall to steel drums on the way to a beautiful moment. After the recessional, once the wedding party has walked out of easy hearing, the band breaks into an instrumental Hotel California with the steel drums going sinister and eerie, and you suddenly wonder what fate awaits the wedding crowd once they revert to the “ugly American” stereotype. The story turns again, transformed into a prelude to horror…perhaps the dark sorcerer of Aqua Vitae did not like having his fancy dinner interrupted.

Speaking of which, the author would like to note that in combination with the water pouring out of the ceiling of the fancy Sir Andrew restaurant, the loud American crowd transformed a romance story first to disaster, and then to charming absurdist farce.

Friday Cat Blogging

In a previous life I was a marmoset.

I was a kangaroo.

Walrus!

Cirque Du Soleil Contortionist.

Rumpot.

Friday Cat Blogging

My cat has no nose!

How does she smell?

Terrible!

That’s supposed to be funny, right?

Yeah, pretty sure that was the plan, but even the woodchuck isn’t laughing.

See.

Friday Cat Blogging

Thif iv the moft delifous cobeweb evar!

You’re eating spider-butt-stuff? Eeeew!

I dunno, a little garlic, a little butter…

Did someone say butter? ’cause, I’d eat that. Wake me up when it’s ready.

On totally unrelated note, sit in the damn chair thumb-monkey. I need a lap.

I iz not cat. I iz swamp-dragon Lola!

Friday Cat Blogging—Distracted Day

I R Dignity!

Who the hell is that?

I have no…is that my tail?

Focus, Dude!

But the butterflies…

Butterflies are delicious. Also, have you ever really looked at your paw?

Series, –ologies, and Outlines

A while back I got a question about planning ahead and the WebMage world come in and I thought the answer might be something I should share.

How far in advance do (did) you plan what happens to your characters. Did you know most of the things early on, or did they come to you as time went by? For example, (J) wondered about Ravirn’s name change.

That depends on the specifics and when I wrote a given book. I tend to know much more much earlier at this point in my writing career than I did when I started out.

So, Cybermancy was much more thoroughly plotted out than WebMage. I didn’t know about Ravirn’s name change in WebMage until a couple of weeks before I wrote it, though I knew that I wanted Ravirn cast out of his family months beforehand–the name change was a detail triggered by listening to Jane Yolen on a panel about trickster characters.

In terms of the impact of the Raven thing on Cybemancy, I literally had no idea until I started writing Cybermancy, because at the time I wrote WebMage I had no plans for a sequel. I only started playing with the idea of a second book when my agent suggested I might want to think about that if the eventual publisher asked for one.

Likewise, when I finished Cybermancy I wasn’t planning for more books, because the numbers hadn’t started coming in. But very shortly thereafter WebMage hit and almost immediately went into a second printing, and that suggested that it was something I should be thinking about. So, I figured out much of what I wanted to do with CodeSpell and MythOS the September after WebMage came out, though I didn’t write the proposals for another two months.

At the time I’m writing this, Book V, assuming there is a one, is roughly plotted in terms of the highly technical “things what has to happen” model but not in terms of a sequence of events. The looseness of this process is in part because WebMage wasn’t planned as a series and has just sort of grown, and in part because it’s an open ended series and not an –ology of any sort.

The Black School books (a trilogy of which two are now written) were always planned as a three book arc, with me knowing the broad outlines of II and III before I ever started writing I. The proposal for II and III looks radically different in terms of specifics than it would have if I’d written it before writing I, but the big events and the arc are much the same as they have always been.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog November 27 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Point of View

POV Part 1, Shifts Within Scenes:

So, one of my students asked me about Point Of View (POV) shifts, multiple POVs, and multiple protagonists.

This is an interesting question for a number of reasons, not least because the way it is handled varies wildly from genre to genre and over time. For example, young adult is (or has been—these things shift with startling speed) mostly all right with mid-text snippets out of the POV of the scene’s main character. Modern F&SF frowns on shifting POV while in-scene, rather a lot, though, of course, there are exceptions.

Caveats: Note the “in-scene” there, it’s important, I’m not talking about multiple points of view alternating scene to scene or chapter to chapter. Also, as with every rule of publishing, sufficiently outstanding writing trumps all.

I personally have trouble with in-scene POV shifts. In my experience, jumps outside of a scene’s established POV tend to be weaker writing. This is for two reasons.

One, out of POV snippets are more likely than regular prose to tell instead of show, an inherently weaker form. Show, Don’t Tell when applied as an iron clad rule is a bad idea, because there are simply times when the writer has to tell or has to do both (Eleanor has commented on that here), but as a guideline it’s trying to get at an important point–actively engage the reader whenever possible.

Two, in-scene POV shifts usually signal that the writer has encountered some situation that he or she hasn’t figured out how to approach from within the established format of the ongoing narrative, thus forcing the writer to cheat, again inherently a weaker solution than maintaining the form established for the narrative.

The corollary to all this is that staying in POV usually results in stronger writing. Not always, of course, but usually.

That said, good writing trumps all. If you’re going to do in-scene POV shifting, make sure that you give your reader the tools to make sense of it. The few times I’ve seen it done well, the writer has always given the reader something to hold onto as they change POVs, a banister (term borrowed from Barth Anderson who got it from somewhere else). So, you might do something like this:

Main narrative voice.
Out of POV bits.
Main narrative voice.

Or this:

Main narrative voice.
***
Out of POV bits.
***
Main narrative voice.

The things is to give the reader that banister–some simple way of knowing that this bit is different from that bit over there.

POV part 2, Multiple POVs and Multiple Protagonists

First thing these are NOT the same thing.

Second thing, multiple POVs is bog standard as a tool for writing fiction and perfectly acceptable to pretty much the entire writing world. It only becomes an issue (not a problem necessarily, but definitely an issue) when you start to get into a bunch of in-scene POV switching. There it will often both confuse the reader and weaken their emotional investment in the scene’s primary character.

Third thing, reader investment. That’s really what it’s all about. You, the writer really want your reader to have an investment in the story. You want them to feel a sense of possession–that this is their story too. That’s the root of having your reader really care about what you write. There are two primary types of reader investment, emotional and intellectual. The emotional one is significantly more powerful in keeping the reader involved. Intellectual investment is important and can substitute for emotional investment to a degree, but it’s not as visceral a commitment, nor generally as deep.

And reader investment is where multiple protagonist stories start to run into issues.

One of the first things that a reader does at a conscious or unconscious level is to ask Whose story is this? If the answer is simple: This is X’s story, then the reader brain moves on to the next tier of questions. If the answer is more complex: This is the story of a bunch of people and how they interact, or this is the story of a planet, or this is the story of a movement the reader brain has to do more work. Some readers prefer this. Some writers manage it so skillfully that the reader brain doesn’t worry about it too much. But no matter how you slice it, the reader’s brain is doing less work with a story that belongs to one character.

Likewise, it is much easier for the reader to emotionally invest in one central core character, particularly if other POV characters come into conflict with that core character. We are a tribal species and we tend to take sides. If we know whose side we’re on going into a conflict, we’re more comfortable. It’s easier to have a best buddy in the story or a single person that the reader can project themselves into.

Can more protagonists be included successfully? Absolutely? Can you have a story about a planet? A conflict? A movement? Again, absolutely. But it will be harder to get solid reader investment in the story and therefor harder to do successfully. Like everything in writing it’s a balance. Is the added degree of difficulty in engaging the reader worth whatever it is the multiple protagonists buy you in terms of the story you want to tell?

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog in two parts on November 12th and 14th 2007, and original comments may be found there as well as in this response post by Sean Michael Murphy where we discuss the subject at some length. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Writing Short Fiction

The major magazine markets for short F&SF are dying. Pretty much everybody agrees on that. The reactions range from please help save them (slushmaster) to so what (Scalzi). People have talked about causes, among them: the writers aren’t stretching enough (VannderMeer) and the short markets have become a bunch of writers writing for other writers who edit and put out stories for writers who read writerly stuff–see point four here (Bear). I tend to favor the club scene theory Bear is talking about plus a dash of the idea that the internet has really changed the way people digest small chunks of content, i.e. substituting blogs for shorts.

2013 update: Though the print magazine continues to decline, the online market for short fiction has really expanded into a much more viable scene in the years since I originally wrote this post. Many authors with an established fan base have also started publishing shorts either stand alone or in micro anthologies via Amazon and other ebook venues. At this point, only six years on from the original, I am no longer giving advice on what to do with shorts in terms of publishing, as my focus on novels has left me hopelessly out of date. OTOH, my main point about shorts from the writing/learning to be a writer point of view still stands…I think.

I give you all of that as a sort of background to what I really want to talk about, which is why I write short stories and I why I think any F&SF writer who can* write shorts should. Sarah Monette talks about some of the same things here in terms of why she writes them, and that’s definitely worth a read. One place where I disagree with both her and Scalzi is in terms of what shorts can do for a career, so I’ll start there.

Both Scalzi and Monette mention that there are better ways to raise your profile for readers–blogging is mentioned–and I agree on that. The thing that shorts can do for you career-wise that blogs and many other venues don’t do, is establish you as someone who has been vetted by some sort of serious professional editorial process. While that may not sound like much, it means a lot in terms of bona-fides for agent queries. And getting an agent is becoming ever more critical in breaking into the novel biz via the large houses, which necessity is something I’m going to talk about in its own post later. Beyond that, Monette’s point about learning how to be a professional writer through the short story markets is a great one.

Monette also talks in brief about the risk-taking element, the fact that you can try things in a short that you wouldn’t dare try in a novel. I’d go beyond that to say that short stories are one of the best venues a new F&SF writer has for learning the craft, because in addition to being daring you can afford to be mundane–to practice the simple things.

You can write ten or dozen shorts where you focus on mastering a single aspect of craft like plot or character and let the rest of the stuff go hang. The brevity of the form allows for a lot more of the try/fail cycles an artist need to master the craft.

A short also forces the writer to pay attention to things they might not have to in a longer piece. If you’ve got a 5,000 word cap on how long the story can go, you have to make the hard choices about what elements of the story are important enough to keep on the page. You have to go for late entry and early exit. You have to make damn sure that every single word is important. You can’t have extraneous scenes that don’t advance the core of the story. In a short a writer knows that they must catch the reader’s attention right now and hold onto it–there’s no time to do anything else.

And, guess what? Those things are all true for novels as well. Sure, in the longer form you can get away with earlier entry and later exit and longer chunks that don’t do anything more than show off some cool side bits, but the question is: Should you? The answer: Maybe, but you should never do it unawares or unweighted. Short story writing helps teach the balancing skills a writer needs to decide when and where to go long.

*Some writers simply aren’t suited to the medium, and that’s fine.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 29 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Friday Cat Blogging—Construction Edition

Did you just hear a crash? Because I thought I heard a crash.

Yep, that was the ceiling in the mudroom, I think.

*crash*

You think?

Yuh-huh. We heard the crash all the way out at Castle Gaiman.

Did someone say crash, because I didn’t hear anything. Also Ima trying to nap here.