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

R E S P E C T and R E L I E F

2013 update:  One of the fundamental social problems for the beginning writer in America is the resistance of friends, family, and even total strangers to the idea that writing is a legitimate pursuit.  At least, until you’re making money at it. My experiences abroad have been very different, but here in the USA there is a major cultural bias against work that doesn’t bring in a paycheck. Without that monetary stamp of approval, strangers will say things like “no, I meant what do you do for a living.” Family will ignore your boundaries and ask you to do all sorts of things during your writing time because you’re not really working. Even friends will often fret about your chances and worry that you’re wasting time you’ll never get back. It is because of this that eight years on my primary feeling about getting my first novel published is still relief despite the unusual levels of support that I personally experienced on my road to publication. Now, on to the reblogging. 

As part of a longer post over at her personal blog my friend and fellow author Lyda Morehouse wrote: Writers, in particular those who haven’t got book or short story credits to their name yet, have a hard time convincing their friends and family that what they do is real and important. Getting a paycheck is something you can wave in people’s faces to say, “Yes, actually, I got paid to write, thank you very much.”

This brought me back to trying to explain to people how I felt when I sold WebMage (the novel-when I sold the short story I was unambiguously delighted). Now, let me first note how fortunate I am in my friends, family, and writing community. Pretty much from the get go, I’ve had incredible support from people who really believed in me and what I wanted to do. In particular, my wife, Laura, has never wavered in the slightest in her belief in my writing, not even at those times I myself was wavering.

When I sold the novel I had quite a few friends who were not upset exactly, but certainly concerned about my apparent lack of wild excitement. Part of this was because I was going through a particularly difficult family trauma and there was fear on the part of my friends that the strain of that was devouring my joy. There may even be some truth to that hypothesis. But it wasn’t the whole or even the majority truth, because I was intensely engaged in the experience of having sold a book. It’s just that what I was feeling was mainly relief.

Relief from my own occasional conviction that I was never going to make it.

Relief that I would never again have to say “yes, I’m a writer of novels but…”

Relief that I had not let down all the people who had supported me on my way here.

Relief that the long trial of apprenticeship was over.

I have had a hard time explaining this to most people, though there are two major categorical exceptions: 1) Other writers-who have been there. 2) Ph.D.s-who have also been there. With the latter, all I had to say was “Do you remember how you felt when you passed your defense? Like that.” And the response was a knowing nod or a wry smile.

Selling the book or passing the defense means you have passed through the fire. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to have a career or be a success. It just means that you have survived the ordeal of getting to the place where those things are now genuinely possible. That may sound pessimistic, but it’s not. It’s the voice of relief, and it’s everything.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 19 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Sci Fi

So, I stumbled on this iteration of the sci-fi/skiify/SF/Science Fiction discussion, via Frank Wu who links to Lucy Snyder.

This one fascinates me. I personally use sci-fi, SF, science fiction, and speculative fiction pretty interchangeably, and I’ve never understood the conniptions some folks have about the term sci-fi. This is despite the facts that I’m a third generation fan, that I’ve been going to conventions for 25 years, and that I write and publish in the field.

I really don’t get it. Yes, some people use the term to denigrate the field. However, for those who think science fiction is a waste of time, it’s not about terminology it’s about content. They’re going to dump on science fiction no matter what you call it. In my experience they also use the term science fiction to denigrate the field. If you talk to them about SF, they assume you mean San Francisco until you explain it to them, then they dump on SF. Likewise speculative fiction.

This whole debate seems to me to be a sterling way to let the people who hate the field define the way you should talk about it, and to turn the term sci-fi into something that people who are on the pro science fiction side of the fence use to bash each other over the head with. In short: getting worked up over sci-fi seems terribly counterproductive.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 13 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

2013 Update: Adding in my comments from the original post in response to Lyda noting that Sci-Fi registers as a media fandom thing for her or a non-reader thing.

I don’t get the non-readers thing. I’ve used the term sci-fi all my life and I am not a media person and never have been. I don’t watch television at all and haven’t in more than a decade and I rarely watch movies. I come from a family culture of reading first and media as a distant and barely visible second. I picked up “sci-fi” exclusively from literary sources.

Actually, thinking about it, it rings as an academic/literary term for me, c-sci, poli-sci, sci-fi.

Friday Cat Blogging

Not so sure about this new tower style litter box…

Argh! That which has been seen cannot be unseen. Grosssssss!

We’re judging you for your litter box humor.

Look over there, a ctulhu-yeti!

Wait, what the hell was that?

Dude, have you ever really looked at a cobweb, because, like, whoooah!

Things are really strange at Chez McCullough…

                                                                         Yes, yes, they are.

Rejects and Rejectomancy

Rejectomancy is the art of reject divination, or trying to figure out what the editor or agent really meant from the few short sentences of the rejection letter. By and large it is a fruitless and frustrating pursuit, especially with form letters. And even with personal rejections it’s not a great idea, though some of those can be quite clear. That’s because what a reject means is very simple:

This story did not work for this editor on this day. That’s it.

The best illustration I’ve ever had of this principle comes from a mistake I made, emphasis on the word “mistake,” as in do not do this.

I have something like 400 rejections to date. One of them is for a story later sold to that same editor at that same magazine with no rewrite—FimbulDinner to George Scithers at Weird Tales. At the time I had something like 25 stories out making the rounds. When you have dozens of stories going to dozens of magazines and anthologies with wildly different response times, careful bookkeeping becomes very important.

I’m pretty good at these things and keep a spreadsheet with pages arranged by story, by market, and by editor. Unfortunately, I somehow failed to log the particular rejection in question (a personal). As mentioned above, George had bought other stories of mine and he was actively looking for me to submit more.

At the World Fantasy Convention a few weeks later he asked me what I was sending him next. Having failed to log this particular story, and having forgotten he’d rejected it, I mentioned the title, gave him a two sentence pitch and promised to drop it in the mail ASAP.

So, I did that. Then about two weeks later, I stumbled on the rejection in my to-file stack and realized what had happened. Aiee! I thought. This was and is a significant faux pas. So, I quickly banged up a note admitting to and apologizing for my mistake and offering to pull the story. It crossed with the acceptance and contract in the mail.

Same story, same editor, different day, different result.

I am not suggesting that anyone should resubmit a story to an editor who has already seen and rejected it, far from it. I screwed up. I also got lucky.

So, the moral of the story is: reject = not for this editor on this day, send it on to the next one. Nothing more. Nothing less.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 2 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

The Spanish Exposition-Outlines (A Cautionary Note)

During  my original run of outline posts over at Wyrdsmiths, my friend and fellow author Lyda Morehouse brought up something that I felt was quite important

Lyda said. “It might not matter what you call it, but when I first started writing novels I felt I HAD to outline like that and it pretty much scared the crap out of me.”

This is the most important thing to know about outlines:

If outlines don’t work for you, or if you need to call them something else, or construct them in a different way—say as clusters of words on a whiteboard, do that. There are a 1,001 ways to write a novel, every one of them right. If something works for you, do it. If not, don’t let anyone tell you that it should. Move on and find something that does work. Everything we say here is meant by way of suggesting things that may help, not as laying out the one true path to novel success.

Lyda does things in her process that would drive me over the edge and vice-versa and yet both methods produce novels that sell. The only thing that really matters processwise is that you write and that you finish at least some of what you write.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 30 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

 

The Spanish Exposition-Outlines (Part II)

Outline, a personal lexicon:

Sketch/Brainstorm: When I have a new idea for a story I always write it down in brief and tag on ideas for expanding the idea into something with a plot, characters, and fully realized setting. This can run anywhere from three sentences for a short or poem to two or three pages for a multi-book idea. I have hundreds of these in my ideas file, including probably 30-40 novel outlines sufficiently fleshed out to start writing.

Working: When I actually start in on a new project I take the sketch outline and expand it to something that gives me a good idea of the first third of the story, a rough idea of the middle bits and a good handle on the ending. How much work this is depends on how fully fleshed out the sketch outline was. This will typically run around 3-5 pages and include notes to myself along with the narrative paragraph blocks–things like “establish ruthlessness in dialogue here,” or “she will return in book two as a ghost.”

Timeline: In order to keep the days of the week, dates, moon phases, holidays, etc. organized, I almost always create a timeline for each novel with important events attached to specific days and dates and sometimes times of day or other time indicators. I do this both for the arc of the story and for historical and future events relative to the story. That last part is where it becomes more like other outlines as I use this as another type of sketch/brainswtorming tool.

Ongoing: As I’m writing, I constantly update the working outline with ideas for upcoming bits of business, plot points, character nuggets, and magic system chunks. At some point, generally when I hit the place where the working plot goes all sketchy I will sit down and lay out a chapter-by-chapter scene-by-scene outline for what happens from there to the end of the book. This can run as much as 30 pages single spaced.

Length: This is a specialized form of ongoing outline. By the time I move to the ongoing outline I generally have a very good idea of the book’s natural chapter length which can vary widely depending on all sorts of factors including number of POV characters, type of POV, and target audience–I generally write shorter chapters for YA. What this allows me to do is take my ongoing outline and figure out how long the book is likely to be based on chapter length and how much material needs to go into each chapter and scene. More importantly, it allows me to add or subtract story elements to help me achieve a target length–I’m usually within a thousand words of target length when I finish a draft. Since writing to length can be very important to editors and for specific markets, this is an enormously valuable tool and simple to use. Do I have too many chapters? Collapse some scenes and ideas together. Do I not have enough, open some scenes out into full chapters or add others to achieve effects I hadn’t thought I’d have room for.

Narrative/Proposal/Pitch: This is largely a sales tool, though I also use it to do brainstorming/sketch work for books that are part of a proposal but not yet written. These have to have a very specific form and often have set lengths–particularly for newcomers to the field. They can run from 1-5 pages either single or double spaced depending on submission guidelines and they must be in present tense (with the exception of quoted material from the book). They also can’t keep secrets.

2013 Update: The last couple of books I’ve pretty much taken the narrative outline and worked off that, with with my ongoing outline done as voice notes and bits thrown into the text at the end of the book, and my timeline bits tossed into the master timeline for Fallen Blade. After novel fifteen (Broken Blade) I moved into a looser process. I still use all the processes described here, I’ve just gotten much better at doing them in my head.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 28 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Friday Cat Blogging

LASER treat tracking systems emgaged.

There were treats and nobody woke me?

You snooze, you no gets treats. Sorry. Iz because rulez.

Did someone say zomezing aboutzzz…oh, never mindzzz  zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I have nothing but disdain for your petty cute picture taking ways, thumb-monkey.

What the heck? Someone said treats. Then there were naps, and now no treats. Confuzed.

I am not a cat, more like a very small dragon, but I too like treats….

Dragon? Hmph, I eat dragons for breakfast.

The Spanish Exposition-Outlines (Part I)

I started to write a comment in Sean Michael Murphy’s post on outlines, but it quickly turned into Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch—my chief use of outline is as a book writing tool…book writing tool and book selling tool..selling and writing… My two main uses for an outline are book writing and book selling…and structuring. My three uses are… and so on. Now it’s become so big that I’m actually going to do it as a two or three part front page post.

Over the years I’ve become a militant outliner. My first two books were written off the cuff, and though I still love the bones of both stories, I can see how knowing where I was going from the beginning would have produced a better end product. My third had a crude outline, and my fourth had a cruder one. Since then, I’ve gotten steadily more efficient and focused with outlines and it’s led to big improvements in writing speed and quality.

Brief digression: I hated outlining in college. Absolutely hated it. I would go to great lengths not to have to write outlines for papers, even going back and writing outlines post paper in classes that required them so that it looked as though I had followed the desired process. To all the professors who tried to get me to outline back then, mea culpa, you were right, I was wrong.

2013 update: second brief digression. The last couple of books I haven’t outlined as completely on paper, but that’s mostly because I can hold an entire book in my head much better now, and I do much of my outlining as voice notes these days.

Back to the main topic. I use many different types of outlines in my work (updated to add timeline):

Sketch/Brainstorm
Working
Timeline
Ongoing
Length
Narrative/Proposal/Pitch

These each have their own foibles and uses, and I’ll get into that in part II tomorrow.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 28 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Story and Sleep

I’m an insomniac. Let’s start with that. Sleeping is a skill I’ve never fully mastered and I am subject to both going to sleep too late and waking up too early, as well as occasional bouts of being awake in the middle. In general this is no fun, and actually in specific as well, now that I think about it.

But what does this have to do with writing you might ask. And it’s a reasonable question. I’m not entirely sure it has anything to do with writing, but it definitely has to do with being a writer, or more specifically a storyteller. Not only do I tell stories literarily (my writing) and socially (at parties) but I tell stories to myself in a more or less continual stream.

Someone smiles at me as they drive past me on the freeway? I automatically make up all sorts of things to explain the smile. I can’t help myself, given any starting point and something unknown, my brain starts filling in the gaps. This is one of the two chief sources of insomnia for me–the other being problem solving–I can’t get my brain to shut up and quit telling stories. I seem to need the damn things.

As with most storytellers, I am an avid consumer of storytelling (that might even be the root of being a storyteller–an impulse that says “well, if nobody else is going to tell me a story…). Often this leads to reading–yes, the horror, a writer who reads–quite often at night, when I might otherwise be sleeping. Because of this and the complete exhaustion of some life stress I made a discovery about three years ago.

I sleep better if I don’t finish reading the book. In fact, I can almost always go straight to sleep if I put it down at a cliffhanger moment. If, however, I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open but I still push on to the finish to see how it all ends, I will then spend the next several hours wide awake.

This is because (I think) when there’s still story left at the time I put the book down, my brain stays in happy reader mode–the story is still in the hands of the author and therefore it is not my problem. OTOH, if I finish the book, the storytelling part of my brain knows that the author is done and realizes that if it doesn’t do something right now the story will end! There will be no more story! Aiee!

And so my brain kicks into high gear telling a new story. It may be the story of what happens in the book after it ends, or it may be the story of what’s going to happen to the stupid cat who is sitting on my head. That part’s not really important. The important part is that story is once more my responsibility. I bring this up because last night, like an idiot, I finished the book.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 26 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Tastes Right

I do all sorts of things as a writer and critiquer on the basis of how they taste to me, whether the words feel right in my mouth as I’m mentally speaking them—I always internally voice as I’m writing, perhaps because I came to writing from theater.

The best example of this comes from a critique I did for fellow Wyrdsmith Sean Michael Murphy. There was a sentence where I wanted one word changed—I don’t remember which one now, but that doesn’t really matter. It was one of a large number of suggestions. Sean was pretty happy with most of the suggestions, ignored some, and wanted to understand what I was thinking with others. This was one of those last and the conversation went something like this:

Sean: Why did you suggest this change? I think you’re right, but I’m not sure why.
Kelly: It just tasted better.
Sean: But why did it taste better?
Kelly: It just did.
Sean:…(waiting patiently)
Kelly: (unable to let the silence stay silent, begins mentally unpacking the process) Let me think about it…

It turned out that when pressed I had six separate reasons for wanting this one word changed. For me, the change reinforced something in the sentence, reinforced something in the paragraph, reinforced one of the story’s themes, amped up a plot point, showed a contrast between character voice pre and post traumatic event, and removed a slightly clumsy related word repetition.

I’ve found that’s usually the case when my brain says something tastes better rather than opting for a specific reason—my sub-conscious has a bunch of reasons to change something and is too lazy to articulate them all without being pressed. My new structural sense is definitely atasting thing because it’s hugely complex. I trust it in part because I know that the taste of something is very important for my process, but I still want to unpack it because I enjoy unpacking.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 19 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)