Will Shetterly, a noted fantasy author with whom I am currently unfamiliar, is now writing reviews for GMR as well. His first review is of the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This review is spoiler-free, but Shetterly says that his reviews-to-come of later seasons will likely involve spoilers. Anyway, Buffy fans can check him out. (I wonder if Blockbuster stocks the Buffy DVDs….I wouldn’t mind giving the show a try one of these days….)

Share This Post

With today’s posts, my story “Graveyard Waltz” should fall off the main page, so I added a permalink to it under “Notable Dispatches” (along with a few others). Just in case anyone happens by.

Share This Post

Notes on the Works In Progress:

:: I finished typing the initial draft of my Snow White story yesterday, and it came in at 7700 words, the shortest rough draft I have yet produced. Weird — maybe I’m finally learning how to tell stories with less verbosity. I’m letting that story sit for a day or two before I edit it. I usually let stories sit fallow for a week or two before editing, so as to come back to it with less of a feeling of “immediacy”, which I hope translates into a heightened ability to wield the red pen. In this case, though, I’m so enamored of the tale that I want to get it out to market sooner than later. So tomorrow or Tuesday I’ll probably do the editing.

:: I’m already onto the next story, which is about a homeless person who experiences a peculiar turn of luck. In fact, I wrote three pages of it over the last few days, but this morning I scrapped those pages and started over, in less meandering fashion. I’ve long believed that a main reason many people who could write don’t is because they’re scared of what happens if they produce some work and then realize it’s not going anywhere. The answer is, of course, “Toss it and start over”. That old stereotypical image of a writer tossing crumpled sheets of typing into the garbage is somewhat romanticized, but it’s also somewhat rooted in reality. There is a lot of stopping and going back, sometimes even all the way to the beginning. But in my experience it isn’t as tortured as it’s usually depicted, as if the writer is trying to produce Prose of Perfection on the first try. With me, it’s a vague sense that something’s awry which grows until I can no longer ignore it; and then I go back and figure out, as best I can, where things went wrong and I go back to that point.

So my answer to the “What if I produce crap?” conundrum is this: You will produce crap. So get it out of your system. (But what if what’s left after that act of exorcism is crap, too? Well, that’s the risk we all take, isn’t it?)

:: Editing the novel proceeds, although I slacked off a little bit this week. As of this writing, I am a bit less than halfway through the manuscript — call it four-ninths of the way through — and have excised 7,422 words. I’ve noticed that a lot of what I’m cutting consists of lengthy passages where I describe my heroine’s responses to and impressions of, well, everything. Stuff kind of like this:

Bob walked through downtown Des Moines and gazed wonderingly up at the tall buildings — both of them — and tried to envision the men who had built them. How had it been, to walk on those girders twenty stories up, weighted down with hammers and nails and bolts and saws and stuff? And what had they done when the realization struck them that they had gone all the way up there but forgotten their tape measure? It must have been terrible for them. And what if they had come to work after a fight with their wives? Did they ever have the temptation to jump? Bob imagined them leaping from the top of those buildings and….

I came to the realization that, if I don’t care what my heroine thinks of these things, then my readers sure as hell are unlikely to care about them. So out come those passages, except for a few key ones that I think work to better effect because I took out all the other ones.

(And some of this new attitude of mine reflects advice once given to me by Mola Ram, but I’m choosing to view that as a coincidence. Yeah, that’s it….coincidence….)

:: In Stephen King’s book On Writing, there is a short appendix in which King presents the first few pages of a short story rough draft he wrote, followed by his revised version of that draft, with explanations of the various edits given. The complete version of that story, “1408”, appears in his recent collection, Everything’s Eventual. I read it this morning. In the little introductory blurb about the story, King says that that “Every writer of shock/suspense tales should write at least one story about the Ghostly Room At The Inn.” Well, damned if I didn’t think of just such a story within minutes of reading that. (It’s a good story, too.)

Share This Post

There are a lot of wonderful sounds of summer: the crack of a baseball bat against a ball as it connects on the sweet spot, the flare-ups of a charcoal grill as the fat from a big ole beef patty starts to melt and drip down, the chirping of the birds, et cetera.

But one of my favorites is the unmistakable rumble of ten or more Harley bikes and choppers as they come down the main drag and zoom by. I never hear that sound that I don’t immediately wonder if that’s not the sound of an amphibious landing.

Share This Post

Time for some short stuff for Saturday….

:: Admiral! There be robins here! Yep, the eggs are hatching. Attentive readers may (or may not) recall that a few weeks ago, a robin nested in the potted ivy plant that we have hanging just outside our balcony door. As of this writing, two of her three eggs have hatched. This means that we’ve pretty much lost the use of our balcony until the babies leave the nest, but that’s OK, I guess. It’s a nice little nature-lesson for the kid. (Oh, and baby robins immediately after hatching are…well, they’re ugly: a mass of pink flash the size of my thumb, covered with little stubby-things that are feathers, I guess.)

:: Sean and his wife maintain a separate weblog documenting their experiences of raising their twins, mostly with those gently humorous moments that kids seem to provide in droves. They update in spurts, and they’re in the middle of just such a spurt now. Check it out, if you’re into such things. (My own daughter has discovered Slurpies at 7-11, and while she is fearlessly riding her bike at speeds that turn me into The Annoying Dad [tm], she has recently developed a paralyzing fear of slides. OK….)

:: I just finished reading the memoirs of Sir Georg Solti, the late and great conductor most noted for his stewardship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and for his staggering recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Solti was a hero of mine, but I was unaware that he had written memoirs until I spotted them on the library shelves two weeks back. I remember the suddenness of his death in 1997, and parts of the book are haunting in this regard, particularly the last chapter, in which he discusses his views on some of the great works of the orchestral repertoire. Occasionally he says something like, “I haven’t conducted that piece since 1965, and I plan to do so again in 1998 or 1999….” Alas, it was not to be. Solti didn’t retire, ever: he was still going, full-speed ahead, when he suddenly died in his mid-80s. (I should also note that for all my love of a great deal of Solti’s recordings, the one time I watched him conduct on television I found his beat utterly incomprehensible. I have no idea how the orchestra followed him. But then, the Chicago Symphony comprises some of the finest musicians in the world.)

:: Gul Macet is on the trail of some Star Wars Original Trilogy DVDs. Evil bootleggers!

:: Good TV shows get canceled, but CBS resurrects the horrible show of theirs with the talking baby. A pox, I say. A pox!

:: Shorter Steven Den Beste: Blogger sucks.

No, I’m not taking over SSDB honors. But I pretty much agree with everything he says here, and I’ve been hoping to switch to Movable Type with my own domain name, hosted somewhere else, for a while now. The problem is, of course, money. Blogger is free, disposable cash is tight, and my goals as a freelance writer have to take precedence now. I know, setting up elsewhere isn’t that expensive: while SDB went whole-hog, with his own server and all, I’ve actually done some investigated and have identified a few options that would cost less than $100 yearly, I think. But $100 is a lot of postage stamps, envelopes, card stock (for reply cards), paper, and ink cartridges. At this point, I’m stuck with Blogger, I’m sad to say.

:: One more parenting note: I’m not sure yet, but I expect that problems may arise when my daughter goes to preschool in a year. Why? Because she knows this song. The song is on a Celtic album of mine that I play a lot. So, in twenty years or so when you’re reading about all those subversive young ‘uns in the paper, I think one of them is likely to be mine. And yet, my position is: I’m fine with it. Sigh….

:: I’ve been forgetting to link this all week: Scott has launched a photo-log to go along with his weblog. (By the way, does the name “Ufez Jones” mean anything? Is that a literary allusion of some sort? Just curious….)

:: We can’t find the WMDs. We also can’t find Digby. Hmmmmmm….where’s my tinfoil hat?

Share This Post

In the “Little Things That Make A Difference Department”, we have the following entry. In my efforts to launch my freelance copywriting business, I’ve been relying on direct mail to drum up prospects. Of course, this costs a bit of money — postage, mailing supplies, et cetera — but I’ve decided to go this route because I loathe the prospect of cold-calling. My last job involved a lot of cold-calling, and that was a business-to-business tele-sales job, selling pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical accessories (I tell you what!) to pharmacies — none of that crap of calling Granny at home and trying to whittle down her meager sales resistance during the dinner hour in hopes that she’ll authorize an eight-year subscription to Field and Stream. I never got very good at cold-calling prospects who had never spoken to me before, so I’m avoiding that like the plague in doing this.

My initial mailing consists of a sales letter, accompanied by a reply card requesting more information. The ones who actually return the card get a larger package: my brochure, business card, fee schedule, and a couple of samples. Then, I plan to call those people within a week of sending the package, because they’ll at least be warmer prospects than some guy or woman who’s only hearing of me for the first time in some phone call while they’re doing something else. So far so good.

Except that in my first two mailings, comprising 120 or so letters, not a single reply card had come back.

I was prepared to chalk this up to a lousy sales letter and try again, except I decided to do one more mailing of the same letter-and-card with about 40 letters, but making one tiny change: I spent a little extra and put postage on the reply cards themselves. Today, three cards from that batch came in, and there may be more in the next day or two. Beyond that, and it’s probably all done. Three replies out of 40 letters may not sound like much, but it’s a 7.5 percent reply rate, which according to Bob Bly (the Joe Montana of FLCW’s, and author of Secrets of the Freelance Writer) isn’t bad at all. The key to success with direct mail is volume, which is why I’m trying to send out at least twenty letters a week. If I can get, say, 500 letters out over a few months, and get a 7.5 percent reply rate on those, that’s thirty-seven responses, or warm prospects. And from that tele-sales job, I know that it’s a lot easier to sell a warm prospect — one with whom you’ve had some contact, and with whose needs you’ve made yourself somewhat aware — than a purely cold one.

(But please don’t ask why I didn’t stamp the reply-cards in the first place. If I had all the answers, I’d be….well, the guy with all the answers, wouldn’t I?)

Share This Post

Greg Greene is annoyed (courtesy Matthew Yglesias) that so many people still link The Agonist, who may well have committed plagiarism a few months back when he made extensive use of another source’s material in his updates on the war in Iraq (during which he got a lot of traffic — so much that he had to set up mirror sites before he was called out). I see his point, but there’s little I can do about it, since I’ve never linked to The Agonist. Oh well….

But then, if the people who are changing their blogrolls to remove The Agonist are on the lookout for a blog to replace it with, well….look no farther than right here! Come on, folks!

(Yeah, I know it’s begging. But a lot of people are still linking William Burton, and he’s now going on four months without posting anything. Sigh….)

Share This Post

I just love TV meteorologist euphemisms. The latest one to catch my ear is “Unsettled”, as in, “The weather this weekend looks unsettled.” Is there any line of work that has more ways of saying “We don’t know what the hell is gonna happen” than meteorology? (Economics doesn’t count, because I’ve never yet heard an economist say “I don’t know what the hell is gonna happen”. They always think they know. Yeah, we know they don’t know. But not them.)

Share This Post

Here’s something I’ve been wondering for a while: in spam e-mails, what is the purpose of that string of seemingly-random letters and numbers that sometimes follows the subject header? I’ll get spam with subjects like this: “HOT BABES HERE! FUR73PPD889”. What’s with that stuff at the end? Is it noise generated by the spammers’ automailing programs, or is it some kind of attempt to get through a spam-blocker, or what?

Share This Post

TBOGG takes a breather from his usual biting (and generally hilarious) political commentary to provide something of an ode to summer.

Share This Post