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I’ve Been Working on The Writing

So it occurs to me we’re always giving you people advise like: if you work at it and keep improving, you’ll be fine.  Or “as long as you keep growing as a writer.”  Or a hundred other such helpful tasks.

And if you’re like me, you sit there and go “How do I know I’m working?”  And “How do I know if it’s improving?” and “how do I work on what I know to be week?”

When I went through the Kris and Dean workshop by kept baffling me by saying things like “trust the process” and “in two years you’ll be able to do this.”

I don’t know about you guys, but my process, mostly, is I write, and if I’m writing mostly to myself, I am pretty comfortable with how I write and I WILL NEVER CHANGE.  You only think I’m joking.

What’s worse, what I like and work at in writing is not necessarily what anyone else likes or even notices. I spent years studying how to drop info in the Heinlein way, and not only do people not notice it, but the master himself had some big honking infodumps.

The kicker is that Kris and Dean are largely right.  If you keep writing, and listening to critique, or trying to improve, you’ll eventually get there.  Sometimes sideways and upside down, if you’re me, but you’ll get there.

But it’s not DIRECTED writing, and if you’re like me, you will have a never ending talent for experiencing all the byways and sideways of how not to do it, before you figure out how to do it.  Let’s suppose you’re also like me and don’t want to spend the next 20 years improving.  Here are a few tricks to work on your writing in a more directed manner that will get you there faster.

1- Read.  Yeah, this seems easy, but it really is not.  Tons of people think they can’t read while they’re writing because it will “taint” them.

Does it?  A little.  If you’re reading something really out of the ordinary, it will come back in your writing.  I remember when I spent two weeks reading the musketeers back to back and all the papers I turned in at school had this… picaresque feel to them.

So? Use it.  You know different books call for a different voice.  While you’re writing, read the voice you’d like.  It’s not even always in the same genre but it helps.

But also, the effect gets less and less as you get older as a writer.  You start mostly writing like yourself.

And reading stocks your subconscious not just with what can be done, but with the current voice (if you’re reading at least some contemporary books.)  What we read now is not what would have made you rich in the 19th century. You need to know what people want now.  (And for this Indie is great, btw.)

2- Diagram what you read.  I have before given an explanation of how to diagram a novel, it’s around here somewhere.  But it’s not just a novel.  You can also diagram a short story or even a scene to see how an effect was achieved.

All of these are better done after you read the piece a couple of times.

To diagram a novel, you go by chapter and strip it of all ornament.  Chapter by chapter, you take out all the incidentals, the description, the fun stuff and look at “What happened in this chapter to advance the plot?”  You write that down with the chapter number.  After you’re done you look at it again and draw the lines that connect it.  Say chapter 2, they got a lead about the missing parrot, chapter fourteen they found colorful feathers, chapter 20 they heard a parrot behind closed doors, etc. till that thread ends.  If you’re visual use different color markers.

This will allow you to see when subplots are developed, and what the rhythm is.

You can do it with a short story or even with a scene, by just stripping the extraneous and putting in the “movements” then doing the same.

3- Read how to write books.

Most writing books are hokum.  They’re not really designed to write GOOD stuff, they’re designed to write stuff that sells to the publishers.  Beware when they talk of “big” books, etc, because if you’re a political/social naif you might not spot that they’re saying “these are pet causes that will stand you in big with publishers.”

There are exceptions.  Of course there are. I always recommend Dwight Swain.  He teach you HOW TO WRITE.  There are others.  Every course I’ve taken from Kris and Dean (WMG Publishing) has been a great course.  There are otehrs that are horrendous for everything but little bits of info.  Used judiciously, they can get you a ways towards your goal.  Just remember at first at least these bits you acquire are to be used in the REVISION phase.  It takes a while to integrate them in the writing phase.

If it strikes your fancy and you think you can learn from it, buy it (or borrow it) and take the parts you can use and ignore the rest.

4- Do exercises.  These are things you write with no expectation of their becoming novels or shorts (but save them, because you never know.)

Even if you’re a gateway writer, and things pour into your head fully formed, unless you’re John Ringo, there will be gaps in the transmission, and places where the static overwhelms the signal, so you need to have the chops to make do in between.

What are writing exercises?

Well, there are books of writing prompts, but you can make them yourself too.  Open the dictionary in three places, and pick three words, then write something involving three words.

Open whatever you use for news, take an article.  Now project that same issue into the future or another world.

Take something you do every day and apply “what if” to it.

Set yourself at least 1000 words.  If it ends up being a short story, great, but even if it’s just an opening, or a scene, if it gives you that practice is worth it.

Do something like this every week for a couple of hours.  Professional artists and pianists practice.  We’re the only art where practice is not supposed to be needed.

I’m here to tell you that’s wrong.  The more you practice, the better you get.

Now stop reading this and go practice.

That Which Is Writing…

But is not putting words on page. Hear me out.

This is the first thing I’ve actually written since I returned from The Trip (caps very much required, more shortly) and I’m not certain my thoughts are even gelling. More like gelatinous: we’ll see.

As a father and a writer, I keep looking for some way to balance those necessities. I can’t let the kids starve (I also can’t make jokes about that until they’re old enough to feed themselves) or go without diaper changes while I lock myself in the office and pound out pages. Nor is it wise for me to indefinitely suspend wordsmithing while I give the littles all the attention their avaricious, little hearts desire. Or the resulting imagination pressure build-up (it’s like steam in a boiler, kinda) could well precipitate an explosion such that said avaricious little hearts would end up- but that’s a subject best saved for fiction.

I’m looking for that balance, and not really finding it. Mrs. Dave and I are looking into a long-term solution for childcare that frees me up from forced social interaction with creatures who aren’t sufficiently mentally stimulating to make up for not writing.

But there’s other parts to writing that aren’t physically typing words, lining them up in sentences, and connecting those in paragraphs, etc. There’s the skull sweat aspect. The thinking, which I’ve historically been pretty good at – though feels downright lugubrious when sleep deprived and starved of alone time – is quite possibly going to be key to at least maintaining the mindset of being a writer (possibly, [epithet of choice]. Is going to be key).

The trick, though, is organization, and that is a thing I have never been particularly good about. I’ve always been able to keep a sufficiency for keeping-on in my head. The bank account has about this much, less recent expenses. The bills are due about now, so pay prior. That kind of thing. But to manage this, I don’t think that method is going to be sufficient. And so I’m looking for a solution, there, as well.

In the very informal online writers’ water-cooler of which I’m a very minor part, we’ve been looking at the option of something to put on a hand-brain. I’ve got a mind-map app, but it’s something that hasn’t really fit the way my mental processes work, and I haven’t yet found something better.

Aside from that possible problem which may or may not need a genuine solution, this writer is doing much parenting. The daddy hat is the one most on my head, these days. After that, it’s the husband hat, as Mrs. Dave’s active duty-ness often requires flexibility on my part to make work.

The Trip was a Big Deal, and it’s likely better we labored under the assumption that it wouldn’t be, else it wouldn’t have happened. LibertyCon was excellent, as usual. I read an unreleased portion of a weird western upon which I’m working, and it was well-accepted. I was honored to sit upon a panel with the author GoH, Jonathan Maberry, and found him to be a delightful panelist, and had great fun kibitzing with him away from the mic.

The Baen dinner was a fraught affair, not because of the setting or food (both of which were excellent), but because Wee Dave attempted to give himself a two hundred degree facial bare moments before we were supposed to show up. The hat shed most of it, though he did end up with a blister that went especially well with the scrapes he gave himself the next week when he pitched out of a van onto a curb. I am reliably informed that he’s showing Mrs. Dave’s self-preservation instinct when she was his age, which bodes ill.

After LC, we spent time in Colorado with my family, with her family, with family of choice, with my family again, and then drove home. Thousands of miles, with a two-year-old, and a six-month-old. It was good, but it often wasn’t a lot of fun. It sure made me appreciate not leaving the house, which I’ve done a lot of since we got home. Not leaving the house, I mean.

Ramble over.

When life eats your time to put down words, it remains possible to do much of the work. I recommend *some* time to write. I’ve seen 250 words per day, or 500 for the ambitious, but getting some fiction written every day. My own key is not treating that work as something vital to accomplish. Make it fun, allow it to be weird, but do the writing. Heck, at 250/day, you still end up with a novel in a year. Not great, perhaps, but when – oh, for example – small children demand 90% of your time and energy, you’re still writing. And that truly is important.

A Puppy Returns From WorldCon – Not an After Action Report

The actual after action report will happen when I’ve had time to recover a bit and process everything that happened. I spent most of my time at the con either attending the business meetings, or presiding over Puppy Central (which was relatively relaxed and enjoyable – thank you to everyone who helped).

The business meetings were particularly enlightening: on average about 150 people attended each day for the 3 hour meetings (4 of them). Very few of the attendees were what might be considered hard-SJW – what I saw (and yes, this is just my opinion and you might think differently) was a group of rather confused fans who want to do what they believe is the right thing.

Think of it this way – if you have been told all your life that X is good and Y has to be given an easier ride to make up for past injustice and so forth, and you’ve never actually run into anything that shows you the problems this causes, you’re going to believe it. When you’re trying to do what you think is right, and a small cadre of powerful and loud people insist that nothing you do is good enough, you’re going to accept the gaslighting and verbal abuse, and try harder to make them happy. It’s a classic abuse pattern, and it works particularly well on the not terribly socially ept (aka almost all of fandom) because we socially awkward types find it more difficult to pick up on subtle abuse.

Add to this unpleasantness a generation or so raised on “self-esteem” policies that don’t allow them to fail in any way so many of today’s young adults are incapable of distinguishing between disagreement and abuse, and you have a perfect storm waiting for somewhere to happen. (For those readers of a social justice-y persuasion, remember the feeling of working hard for something and overcoming difficulties to get there? If you don’t, then I pity you, because that’s where strength of personality and genuine self-worth come from – and there are any number of studies out there demonstrating this, but our education system denies children that feeling and that strength).

Okay. That’s enough of the political-ish digression.

There will be a Sad Puppies 5. It will have more or less the same format as Sad Puppies 4, but I won’t be leading it. That dubious honor goes to Sarah or Amanda (whichever one of them runs slower, I suspect). I’ll be helping behind the scenes, and working with the WSFS committee behind the scenes to help mitigate the damage the motions passed at the business meeting are likely to do to the Hugo brand (Why? Because I don’t want to see an award won by so many greats of the field turn into an irrelevant circle jerk and rather than bitch about its decline I’m going to do what I can to help).

Sad Puppies 5 probably won’t focus on the Hugos – at this stage it’s looking more like being simply a recommended reading list with categories more or less along the lines of the Dragon categories (which, frankly, will be a damn sight easier to manage). More details will happen when Sarah or Amanda get to them. In the meantime, no the Sad Puppies are not defeated. We might seem like a collection of bumbling clumsy… well, puppies, but we love the genre and we’re not into widdling on things or burning them down.

PS: Yes, this is rather rambly and incoherent. I’m freaking exhausted, and if there’s a greater torment for an extreme introvert than having to be social every waking hour for the best part of a week, I don’t want to know about it. You want sensible, talk to someone who can brain. That someone isn’t me right now.

Finding The Story

We’ve all heard the old chestnut about the guy who finds a pile of manure and starts digging through it frantically to find a pony. Because with that much manure, there must be a pony in there.

This is kind of like what writers do, only our work is inside our heads and somewhat less odoriferous.

It’s been a long time since I talked about this, but I remembered the day before yesterday when someone left a comment on my blog saying “I have this splendid idea, but I can’t write it.”  And what he/she (I honestly don’t remember, because I suck with names) related was not a story, but a concept.

You can’t write a story from a concept any more than you can ride a pile of manure.  A good story has a concept.  It might or might not have a message.  Mind you it can have a message too, and still be a punch in the gut.  In fact, short stories are more capable of carrying message and still being a good story than novels.  The medium is more suited to the enforcement of simple ideas.  It’s amazing how many people manage to overwhelm short stories with messages considering that that length is almost MEANT to carry a message.

I think this happens because they never fully come out of the concept stage of the idea, and also because they forgot — or never knew — that the primary function of fiction is to be a vehicle not for idea but for emotion.  Unless that message is well wrapped up in “why this matters” and emotion and a character people can root for, all we’ll taste is the message, which is like tasting what went in to making the sausage.

Many beginning writers get stuck between concept and story.  There is no shame in that.  I have my share of stories that are something like “It was a beautiful planet but they practiced human sacrifice.”  And then the story stops.  Dead.  Because.

I’m talking mostly of short stories here, because they are more concept intensive, but some of these concepts can lead to novels.  In fact, many of the concepts, as you start digging prove not to be a pony but a wild tiger.  You have to be prepared for that and not try to cram everything into a short story.  For instance, Darkship Thieves started as “forbidding cloning is stupid, because people will just do it illegally and it will lead to all sorts of truly spectacularly awful things, done under the cover of ‘there is no cloning’ and—  Oooooooooooh”  Could I do a short story for it?  Sure.  But then I started figuring out what kind of regime/people would do that and if they have cloning and surgery that advanced, what else can they do, and… well… novel.

I’m going to use some simple concepts here, some of which I used before, because I don’t actually want to be forced to write these stories, but I hope it illustrates the principle.

So, say your concept is: flying cars that are easily controllable/avoid accidents are invented, and the roads turn back to nature, and people can leave much further away and isn’t it great?

A beginner will start by showing us the roads going back to nature or something.

The story, if you can call it that will die.

So.

Start with the person this hurts most.  No, seriously, nine times out of ten going “to the pain” will find you the story.

So flying cars are all the thing.  Whom does this hurt most?  I assume the car plants are now turning out flyers.  The long distance truckers have retrained.  Oooh.  Road workers.  Sure there’s other stuff they can do, like maybe gardeners and stuff.  But this guy is a romantic, who loves the smell of freshly poured asphalt.  Most of his friends were in the road crew and they’re now dispersed.  He really loved his job, and it’s now gone.

Open with him getting a call from a friend who wants him to come and work in some public garden thing where a major interstate used to be.  He doesn’t want to.  He hates the idea of never again doing road work and they’re breaking up HIS road to make it a garden.  Meanwhile it’s snowing softly, so he wouldn’t be able to start till next month, anyway.  And his wife is pregnant.

His wife goes into labor.  He can’t take her to the hospital, even though his road is still okay, because his car spins out.  He can’t do anything, it’s all going wrong.  A Flying ambulance arrives, with a doctor, etc.

He sits there, in the hospital afterwards shaking and thinks yeah, maybe there’s something good to this new world.  Maybe he’ll go work that garden project.

Or take a concept I DID make into a short story (published in Year 3000 antho from DAW.)

We have managed to go to space,some sort of portal thing, so we can go to distant planets.  But women can’t go.  Or at least not women who want to have children.  (Yes, I know, biology might or might not be with me.  At the time it seemed to be.)  The cumulative damage to the eggs means that women who stay in space can’t have healthy children.

I confess I made it women, not men, not to piss off feminists (I was much nicer pre-menopause and the sheer mess of the last four or five years) but because the opposite has been done so often: all women societies as a sort of golden future.

So, I went to whom this hurts most.  A woman, of course.  You see, women on Earth are baby-farms and … and the sterile ones can make a good living touring planets and doing sexy shows.

So this woman goes out and isn’t getting the reaction she expects, and she thinks it’s because she’s getting old.  But little hints seem wrong.  There are too many kids in this world.  Sure this world is rich off some found alien biological tech, but seriously, how can they afford these many kids.  And sure, guys pair up, we know this from prisons and other all male environments, but… something is subtly off.

And then she realizes that guys have figured out a way to use that biological tech to have kids without women (I presume artificial wombs, but I don’t go into it.)  She’s obsolete.  Womanhood is obsolete.

I called the story Go Tell The Spartans.  It’s one of my most depressing stories, and I had a hell of a time selling it, bu that was the pony under the pile.

As should be obvious from the above, there isn’t necessarily only one pony under the pile.  My particular quirks and mood at the time led me to one.  I’m sure you’d get others from the same concept.

However, remember: Whom does it hurt?  Go to that person.  And then from there follow “how does their personal arc work?”  “How is the pain resolved, or becomes crushing?”  “How can this person solve his/her/its/dragon problem?”

Follow those threads, and you’ll find the pony in the pile.  You can’t fail.

Good digging.

A Wally for me!

A picture of a good day, just because I am feeling cheerful and it’s not London, but Flinders Island on a good day. This is our dive boat, and the model for the dive boat in Changeling’s Island.

And what happens after the war….

Because there always is after the war.

This post will be all over the place, and quite possibly fairly silly. Yes, I know, that is SO unusual for me. It’s almost as if I said there was gambling in Rick’s Casino.

I’ve been, shall we say, a little tense. My wife had her follow-up colonoscopy a few hours ago (some of you may know that she had bowel cancer a while back, picked up (Thank God for the Australian screening system) early and treated.) Of course one never knows how successful or final this is, so there are regular follow-ups. A colonoscopy involves prep, and trust me that’s pretty terrible. The waiting is not much fun either.

We have an all clear for now, so I am relieved even more effectively than the prep would do. Filled with a great lightness, and reminder of knowing how it felt the first time, and sympathy and understanding all over again for those who have to deal with a bad result.

Why I brought this up is that… well, authors are human. Not all the same, not all likable, not all decent. But as human as the next man or woman, paying bills, making a career, farting in the bath. Well, I will grant you can make an exception for me. A lowly simian I, a thing of rags and tatters… but I do imitations. I can fool people that I’m human at about thirty paces and for as much thirty seconds so long as they’re upwind.

Which brings me around to ‘what happens after the war.’ (Don’t ask me, “Where is Wally” you’ve got to look for yourself.) An author I am acquainted with posted words to this sort of effect: “I can’t wait for the elections to be over and life to go back to normal.”

Now, the author in question had just posted an ‘All Trump supporters are complete morons’ type facebook post. She had deleted posts and unfriended a dozen people and had a complete melt-down over a pro-gun individual of her own political faction. Most of those who follow her… are her readers. Those of similar mindset had cheered and gleefully joined in the pile-ons.

In a few months, whoever wins or loses… it will be over. Please, my point is not to discuss who you or I think will win or lose. It’s that there will be winners and losers, and what happens after that.

I know, that’s the dreaded long-term thinking thing again. If you think you find it hard, what about me? We monkeys seldom think beyond this banana – but it is actually the center of writing. Writing is always a window into before, and after… or at least it is if you’re doing it right (right defined as people want to buy and read your work, not right as in Dave, or Wally (no this is not Wally), or IgNora think I am doing it right.) Short-time preferences are for fools and monkeys, certainly not for writers.

So: take the author above. The war she so wanted to end is over. Let’s imagine she (or her side) ‘won’. Happily ever after, and her life goes back to normal, right?

Well, no. Firstly, just from her point of view, she may have gained some readers who loved her overt stance. There are thousands of openly left wing editors and authors on facebook, and very few of the opposite, and relatively few centrists or those who keep their views to themselves. So: lots of competition, thin pickings, but she may have gained a few. Given that we know the proportions of Americans that self-identify as ‘liberal’ (26%) and the proportion of publishing professionals that donate to the Democrats (At least 99.4%) – that means she pleased her editor, if she noticed (but it’s not unusual)… and lost readers who were once happy to find and follow her from the other 74%.

And here is the thing: in real life, unless you’re really smart about it, losers are sore losers. And they don’t just go away. If they can hurt the victors, they will. If they can strike back and try again, they will. Avoiding that pendulum – WW1 and the treaty of Versailles…. And then WW2 (and the Marshall Plan, designed to avoid a backswing) is hard. Jerry Pournelle had a final scene in one of his stories that I read long ago that has stuck with me long after most of the story has blurred. I paraphrase and obviously emphasize what I found important: The mercenaries have effected a brutal but effective suppression of an uprising. The president thanks them profusely for winning. And the commander says brutally and bitterly that they have not won. The military can’t win. It can only buy time for politics. (and in my opinion, economics). You could in my opinion extend that to Law or even politics. You’re usually fighting for time for people for people to come to terms, adjust… or fail and set up the next conflict. It’s that or total genocide.

The point here is that it is not fast, not easy, and that a ‘win’ does not make the other side disappear or suddenly love you. You might say the SJW or CHORFs or puppy-kickers have ‘won’ every time. And every time they’ve ended up far worse off than before. Because they have had to fight harder, they’ve fought nastier and with more collateral damage each time. They forgot that their foes were human, (cycling back to my start) people with partners, people with illnesses, people with children. More importantly they decided that anyone who was not 110% for them… was against them. They could slander them, attack their reputations, families, livelihood. Anything, as long as they ‘won’. Language like ‘morons, Nazis, put them down, worthless, bad writers, bad actors’ were commonplace. And somehow, ‘miraculously’, they got their chosen tokens their awards, shut out anyone else, and wrote their new Versailles treaty.

Only the ‘defeated’ wouldn’t sign. Would not buy into it at all. There is not even Weimar, trying to abide. And the ‘reparations’ they need to repair the costs of that war, the recognition, the social kudos, and the sales – especially the sales… well, they have the same problem the author who was desperately wanting the election over.

They have a problem of no levers left. They did their worst, and failed to destroy the hard core of their foes, and ended up generating thousands more who didn’t used to hate their guts.  But they do now. Another Pyrrhic ‘victory’ won.

The gulf between the sides widened, And there is almost no-one left on the non-left wing side of the equation who doesn’t put WorldCon and Hugo’s Admins firmly in the camp of the foes, cooking the books, helping the puppy kickers, acting as SJW enforcers. I know there are some folk among them who desperately wanted no part in the fight, to bridge the gap. But they failed to grasp the nettle and show aggressively that they were neutral and trustable. They never understood the teacher’s kid syndrome: When Dave Truesdale possibly steps over the line and the SJW’s squall – you cut slack because you don’t want to be seen as siding with ‘your kid’ and acting as their enforcer. When Mary Three-Names breaks the rules (open-and-shut case, broken) you don’t give her token pat on the wrist because she’s a SJW Darling and therefore ‘your kid’. If you want to be seen as neutral by people who think you’re on the other side… Mary is out on her ear and Dave gets a pat on the wrist. That piece of Con Admin stupidity is barely topped by Dave McCarty’s handing voters data to ‘researchers’ straight out of a Tor Books site.

The 74% have mostly written WorldCon off. Barring major change, It’ll drift into being a WisCon with a few older people going for nostalgia. The Hugo brand is on life-support and will probably soon have a very limited value to a shrinking set of PC virtue-signallers. I know this may not have dawned on the core of 26% but we’ve passed the peak PC. Not that long ago – 10 years – it intimidated everyone, and had no apparent substantive opposition. In the circles they don’t move in… that is no longer true. It is massively and increasingly openly unpopular, and the media are as usual are way behind the curve. In 15 years’ time it’ll be dead except in tiny corners.

So – how does all of this loop into writing, or indeed into preventing another war? Well, as I said: a book is a brief window into a whole world – it inevitably has its roots in the last ‘war’ (whether that is a family fight or the last actual war on a planet, a story does not spring from nowhere. In your set-up you need that, and you need it quickly. Secondly if you’re setting up to write an all out war… you have two choices as an author. Either you destroy your foes completely, neatly finishing the book, or they will recur, stronger and nastier. A few – very talented – authors have actually handled winning the peace well. Frank Herbert used the concept of bravura. Diana Wynne Jones wrote about the losers in the war between Strangia and Ingary (Castle in the Air). If the foe cannot be destroyed, well, it’s a long term thinking task, and basically requires bridging the gap and the victors (not the losers) paying a price and accommodating the losers – making them happy enough, having levers enough, to avoid another war.

So where is Wally?

Well he’s been Haydn (and Haydn’s been dead for years) but here is his last movement. A wally – which is Australian for an incompetent idiot who can’t manage to do anything right – a wally is the sort of guy that, if you put him in a brothel with ten thousand dollars, would not only fail to get himself laid but would have every hooker in the place queuing up at the nearest nunnery to sign up, and would go to the bathroom, wipe his butt, put the money in the toilet and put the used toilet paper in his pocket. In this case our Wally comes from The Guardian, well known as ‘The Grauniad’ (because its spelling and grammar are… legendary) writer Damian Walter. Doing his best to be a little puppy kicker, and hurt careers of writers as best as possible, for political gain – just as I referred to above. Unfortunately for him… and fortunately for us, he’s a wally…

So I’m very proud to be given a Wally. It’s not quite the imprimatur of brilliance of a ‘Clamps’, but there seems to be a bit more money in a Wally. And I’m in grand – indeed awe-inspiring company. Now that I have my own Wally, I look forward to buying my own mountain.

You see Damian is the archetype wally. If he hates you – most folk will love you. If he predicts you will fail – you may buy your own mountain. If he says your prose is awful – he writes for The Grauniad – a financial disaster with a readership going down faster than drawers in the brothel wally would fail in. Oh he’s also a failed writer, who got a grant to write a novel I believe – and still failed. Oh, and he never met a fact he couldn’t get backward.

my comments in Bold

For the last few years, the Hugo awards for science fiction have been campaigned against by a group of writers and fans calling themselves the Sad Puppies – mostly male, very white, and overwhelmingly conservative.

You mean like the ‘mostly male’ very white officially Latina Sarah Hoyt? Or Amanda Green, or Kate Paulk – who headed Sad Puppies this year. Ah Wally.

Unhappy with sci-fi’s growing diversity, the Puppies have deliberately block-voted for certain titles to get them nominated for Hugos at the expense of a wider field.

Which is naturally why, when you count the numbers and actually don’t have Wally’s gender (explains his luck in the brothel) and skin color confusion they were MORE ‘diverse’ and they encouraged voters to both read and to vote for what they wished to. We can give you hundreds of links. Wally’s problem was that they weren’t M&Ms – different colors on the outside but all exactly the same inside.

They say it is their goal to “poke the establishment in the eye” by nominating “unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy-handed message fic”.

Really? I thought I said it was because I was concerned at the drop in sf sales (well documented) meant that the direction was selling badly and that was threatening authors (including his darlings) ability to make a living and write. Some might turn to Patreon but surely the measure of popular (and therefore successful) is selling enough to live on. But yes, heavy handed message fic doesn’t sell well. Look at Kameron Hurley’s figures. She’s published them.

I say it is to sponsor awful writers.

“Sponsor” – you mean like Nora Jemisin getting herself funded by Patreon? No, Wally. We actually SELL books for a living. I know you failed at that, as do most of your darlings, but it is possible. And – based on his track record if Wally thinks we’re awful… I am SO proud to be one of his ‘awful’.

The Puppies have two criteria for what they deem excellence: does it turn a buck?

Well, Wally accidentally got one thing right. The most honest measure of popularity is that people are prepared to pay for your work. That you’re not so useless that you have bleg or get grants or ‘teach’ writing. Yep. Lots of paying readers suggest popular to me. And the Hugo’s in theory were not ‘excellence’ but ‘popular’.

And has the author dared to say anything, ever, that they disagree with?

Yes, well as they lean libertarian they kinda expect you to be contrary… oh wait. Dumb Wally is confused again. No, PC-doctrinaire books are your left wing specialty. You know: the kind that don’t sell, that you rate as ‘excellent’.

This, paired with their conspiracy theories about some big sci-fi publishers, means that they tend to champion mostly self-published authors. Nothing about quality – though you don’t need an in-depth knowledge of sci-fi to understand that a short story called Space Raptor Butt Invasion (yes, really) has not arrived on the Hugo lists because of its calibre.

Actually it was voted in to mock the crap that SJW’s were putting up. But that’s too hard for Wally.

Oh yes, Wally, I get my conspiracy theories from that well known Cooky-looky journal of the paranormal – Publisher’s Weekly. And the US employment stats. That’s why I believe weird stuff like that your excellence is selling like pork chops in Mecca – and the Traditional publishers are cutting their mostly female staff. Oh and Independent Authors are making more money than them. And of course if Wally ACTUALLY knew how to fact check, he’d find out to his shock that no… Jim Butcher isn’t self-published. Neither am I. Or Larry, or Brad or Sarah… I’m moving that way because I like the money.

With this year’s Hugo awards coming on Saturday night in the US, I thought I’d read some of the authors championed by the Puppies. (Don’t ever say I don’t do anything for you.)

Oh no Wally, I would never say you’d never done anything for us. Being slated by you is worth a lot of sales. Please, dear God, don’t praise me, Wally. Anyway- as best anyone can work out you read one paragraph of mine, and less than one chapter of Larry Correia. That’s not a huge sacrifice for most people, but I do appreciate it must have been the hardest thing a Wally like you ever did.

If you find meaning in straight-to-video Dolph Lundgren films, then Larry Correia’s novels will be your kind of read. Correia, accountant-turned-author-turned-Sad-Puppies-creator, kicked off his Monster Hunter series with Monster Hunter International, about an accountant whose boss turns into a monster. So he shoots him. In fact, much of the Monster Hunter series relies rather heavily on people the hero doesn’t like turning into monsters … so he can shoot them.

I am envious. I’d love to be compared to Dolph Lundgren. The idea that a super bright guy, and a commercial success – who is apparently really nice bloke is an undesirable comparison… well… Wally. And as for shooting, as the bullets had no effect on werewolves… shows Wally once again got things got things completely backwards. But never mind, Wally. I’m sure your reading comprehension is good enough for your ‘excellence’.

Sadly, Correia’s books are not quite awful enough to be good. They’re just mediocre. That’s fine – Dolph Lundgren movies are also often mediocre, but plenty of people like them. But did Lundgren’s Masters of the Universe deserve to take the 1987 Oscar over Oliver Stone’s Platoon? I don’t think so – and in that same way, Correia’s novels in no way merit consideration for the Hugos (thankfully, he only made the 2014 longlist).

A measure of popularity or Wally defined ‘excellence’? The Hugos were supposed to be a measure of fan popularity Wally.

Dave Freer’s Changeling Island, shortlisted for this year’s inaugural Dragon awards, is all about story

Actually, Wally, if you’d read more than the first paragraph… you might have figured out that this particular book, which is YA and targeted at 12-14 year old boys, is by almost any accounting ‘message’ fiction. Admittedly, you’d hate that message, and I tried very hard to keep it from being heavy handed. But then to get through to Wally you need a sledge-hammer. It was intended to be a story about which I knew a great deal of the background, as Fisheries Scientist and a diver to keep the action fast moving. I was writing a book for one of the most neglected, belittled and undervalued sectors of the population: the rural boy. In this case an Aboriginal boy who, first and foremost, is just a boy. He finds his roots in his ancestral home and traditional way of life – hunting and fishing, living off the land, learning responsibility, and the love of his heritage. Awful, Wally, just awful. The picture is a link – you can look inside and read a little more than Damian.

– which is fortunate, because sentences as thoroughly mangled and amateurish as Freer’s won’t be winning any prizes (at least I hope not).

Oh I hope this is as good Wally’s other predictions. I’m proud just to be there. But if you’d like to spoil his day you can go and vote for Larry Correia in Fantasy and me in YA. Wally would have to change his underwear if either of us won. He be pretty miserable if it eclipsed the Hugos too

Open with a strong start, they say; now read Changeling Island’s opening:

It had been the most terrifying, miserable day of Tim Ryan’s whole miserable life. He’d just done it to show Hailey. Because … because she said he was too scared. He was. Every time he tried anything it always went wrong. Horribly wrong. And he wasn’t a thief. Well, he didn’t want to be. It was one of the few thing things his dad ever really got angry with him about. And then he’d only been a little five-year-old kid helping himself to a chocolate bar in a store. But Hailey … she said … and he’d do anything to get her.”

In fairness … to Freer … pick any passage, from. Any Puppy author like Brad Torgersen or Sarah Hoyt and you will find … sentences … as mangled as these.

Well, I am in great company then! And John Wright a little later, too. Wally, I must explain this to you: why you’re such a failure and have sold almost nothing ever and I – at last count and not considering myself a success was closing on half a million sales – the purpose of English in a novel is to communicate successfully. To set the scene, to adequately foreshadow the previous ‘wars’ and get the reader rapidly into the mental space of the protagonist is hard. This is the viewpoint of a badly upset, slightly immature 14 year old. Sentence fragments are how he is thinking. It’s more logical and clear than Wally thought, so no wonder you were confused. The book was bought by an editor from a traditional publisher. The editor used to be an academic, teaching English Lit. I believe. It was copy edited by a retired English Prof, who sent me a lovely letter about it, Wally, asking if she could edit any others I wrote. Oddly, she never mentioned sentence fragments.

I’ve run out of time, to say nothing about nausea tablets – so I’ll leave Wally getting confused by John Wright out. As Wally found my writing aimed at a minimum 12 year old too hard, you understand why he’d wipe himself with 100 dollar notes and stick toilet paper in his pocket, when dealing with Wright.

I’ll leave with a last precious Wallyism from Damian Walter.

But the Sad Puppies don’t want any of their books to end up on bestseller lists or TV screens.

Oh. Dearie dearie me! If only I’d known I didn’t want that. I need a time machine. Larry probably needs two. Wally, you prat. I’ve been on several bestseller lists. I’ve even had that option offered. And yes, I still hope for more.

It’s the same frustrating paradigm that British MP Michael Gove hit upon when he said that people were sick of experts, or what Donald Trump plays upon when he rails against “professional politicians”. We’re seeing the Dunning-Kruger effect played out on a mass scale, and the Sad Puppies are just a speck in that wider problem.

A classic example of Wally. The diagnostic for Dunning-Kruger is that the Wally always claims everyone else is bad and thick and… oh a hack. And he is, of course, brilliant. The evidence – when you look at exam results, or actual measurable success, the Dunning-Kruger syndrome Wally comes last. He hasn’t sold any books. He is a failure. He doesn’t grasp the use of sentence fragments.

Now:You’ve read Damian Walter’s high opinion of his own genius. His results: well, he’s a total failure who can’t sell anything. Here is my bio. And I have sold around half a million books. I don’t think that’s particularly good.