[writing|process] A note on titles
riffing on Ed Schubert, himself discussing the magic of titles.
As Seanan and Ed both quite rightly point out, the title has to be interesting, evocative and emblematic of the story, without trying too hard. That might mean short or even brutal in some cases (“Going Bad”), or downright poetic in others (“Mr. Scalpel and Mr. Gloves and the Cancer at the Heart of the World”).
I believe I’ve discussed this before, but here’s Jay’s handy cheat sheet for titling short stories. I suppose it works for novels, too, but having written 450 or so short stories and only about a dozen novels, the issue comes up far less often with book-length fiction.
- If the title is self-evident from the nature of the story, I go with that. (“The American Dead”.)
- Sometimes the title was the original germ of the story idea. (“Lehr, Rex”.)
- Sometimes it’s a memorable line from within the story itself. (“The Sky That Wraps The World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black”.)
- If none of the above works well for me, I go to either a Bible search engine, always selecting the King James version, or a Shakespeare search engine. I enter a few keywords from the story, retrying that search several times with different keywords or concept terms.
Tags: Process, Writing
Posted: 5:20 am Wed September 15 2010 | Comments(1) |
[photos] New Zealand: Cape Palliser
Past Ngawi and the seal colony lies Cape Palliser itself. This is the southernmost tip of the North Island, and definitely qualifies as one of the world’s ass-end-of-nowhere places. (I’ve visited a lot of them, from Point Barrow to the south Gobi Desert, and elsewhere.) Like most a-e-o-n places, Cape Palliser has a stark and compelling beauty of its own.
Cape Palliser Road exiting Ngawi.
Looking back at Ngawi.
The ocean wrapped in misty rain, as seen from the car.
A rather fine upthrusted ridge.
Handy and informative signage.
The coast gets a bit wilder.
Passing by the seal colony.
The lighthouse at the tip of the cape (seen from the west).
A closer view of same.
The lighthouse from the east side, where the road ends. Note the 200 or so rain-slicked wooden steps leading up. Given my general state of post-chemo exhaustion, I declined the climb.
Heading back from Ngawi, we pass a washout.
They’re not kidding. Look closely at the edge of the road in this photo.
As usual, more at the Flickr set.
© 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: nature, New Zealand, Photos, Travel
Posted: 5:07 am Wed September 15 2010 | Comments(0) |
[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen
Your Wednesday moment of zen.
Abandoned house, Mendoza, Texas. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Photos, Texas, zen
Posted: 5:04 am Wed September 15 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad drives home in the misty dark
Midwest Book Review covers small presse releases, including the Fairwood Press release of my single-title novella, The Specific Gravity of Grief — Cancer is a vile mistress for many in life. “The Specific Gravity of Grief” is a combination of novel and memoir from Jay Lake as he combines his own experience with cancer into a novel which he relays as a life not quite his own, but telling his story. “The Specific Gravity of Grief” is a thoughtful take on the cancer story and the grief that follows the loss to the disease, highly recommended. (Via tbclone47.)
AUDIO REVIEW: The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 2 Edited by Allan Kaster — SF Signal, with a lukewarm mention of my short story, “On the Human Plan”.
Best SF reviews my short story “Human Error”
yuki_onna with a great question about male sexuality — She asks men to objectively describe their experiences of orgasm. All kinds of interesting things in comments. And to state the obvious, this link is NSFW, in that it will trigger keyword filters.
Rare Roman helmet goes to auction — An amazing find in Britain. (Via corwynofamber.)
Clouds, Birds, Moon, Venus — APOD channels Maxfield Parrish.
The Fool’s Cap Map of the World — A mighty strange late 16th century map from Strange Maps.
The Bomb Chroniclers — Secret corps of filmmakers documented nuclear tests. (Snurched from here.)
Geocentrism? Seriously? — For those times in your life when Creationism and Intelligent Design just aren’t stupid enough. Although Bad Astronomy says a number of interesting things about geocentrism in this post.
Hybrids May Thrive Where Parents Fear to Tread — (Thanks to Dad.)
[GOP Senate candidate] Angle on why she pulled out of debate she asked for: “We wanted an informed electorate” — The sad part is that statement probably makes sense to her voting base.
?otD: What’s your favorite city?
9/15/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1.5 hours (Sekrit Projekt, 1,800 words)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (interrupted)
This morning’s weigh-in: 251.2
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 2/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently reading: Worldshaker by Richard Harland
Tags: audio, Books, Cool, Culture, Grief, history, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Religion, reviews, Science, sex, stories
Posted: 5:03 am Wed September 15 2010 | Comments(1) |
[writing] Back in short fiction land
1,700 words on “The Decaying Mansions of Memory”, a novelette for a Sekrit Projekt. Written in a florid style which is entertaining me greatly. We shall see what the editor thinks… I may have to write some splatterpunk or nurse romance or something to clear my palate once I’m done with this. Moving a tad slower than usual through this draft, but that’s ok. Words is words.
Tags: Fiction, stories, Writing
Posted: 5:36 pm Tue September 14 2010 | Comments(0) |
[writing|process] The definition of insanity
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
— Rita Mae Brown (often misattributed to Albert Einstein)
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is also the definition of parenting. Kids don’t learn on a smooth curve, they progress in stairsteps. The same child that acts out in a restaurant or has a candy tantrum at the grocery store will eventually stop, if you work hard to deal with those problems. In the mean time, you still go to restaurants and grocery stores because that’s part of life. Each time expecting a different result, regardless of prior experience.
Eventually you get a different result. That’s called growth.
Building a writing career works pretty much the same way. Otherwise none of us would survive our first handful of rejections. I had over three hundred before I sold a single story. Was I insane to keep sending out, and expecting a result different from continued rejection? Apparently not, though since that first sale I’ve had almost fifteen hundred more rejections, and almost three hundred acceptances.
Unless you’re one of those rare people who can explicitly and consciously self-direct your learning processes (I’m certainly not, and off the top of my head I can only name one person who is), almost everything about professional fiction writing, especially in the pre-published and early-career phases, seems to fall under this rubric. You write drafts with flawed characters, critiquers and editors point this out to you, so you write more drafts with more flawed characters. Then one day you write a good draft where the characterization is solid. Your next handful are wobbly, then you get another good one. About then, the feedback you get shifts to complaints about your endings.
Developing as a writer is a game of pound-the-peg. And the peg-pounding part is a process of repetition with expectation of change. My advice? Be insane, just be insane with feedback and effort at self-improvement.
Tags: Process, Writing
Posted: 5:51 am Tue September 14 2010 | Comments(3) |
[photos] New Zealand: Seal colony at Cape Palliser
Just a mile or two past Ngawi, we came upon the seal colony that lives on and around Cape Palliser. This are fur seals, much larger than the harbor seals I’m used to seeing — the bulls were nearly the size of sea lions, or so it seemed.
The day was still cloudy and wet, which meant they were up on the grass by the road. (Understand at this point the road is a rutted track meandering close to the rocky shore.) Apparently sometimes cattle graze down by the ocean, and the seals and cows can be seen together. Sadly, we were not treated to this vision of bucolic utopia. I will observe that the dozing seals were supremely indifferent to our presence, to the point of being virtually comatose. This even though I could have reached out and touched them.
The general look of the shoreline.
I think this is seal for “Are you food? No? Never mind, then.”
I’m going to open my eyes, but you’re not worth any more effort than that.
Ok, halfway open.
This one appeared to be doing yoga. Or stretching out a kink in his back. One of the few moments where I wished I’d brought a video camera.
A more lively fellow.
More of Mr. (or Ms., I didn’t inquire) Lively.
Playing in the ocean, because not everyone can nap all day long.
Watching the waves go by.
As usual, more at the Flickr set.
© 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: nature, New Zealand, Photos, Travel
Posted: 5:40 am Tue September 14 2010 | Comments(0) |
[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen
Your Tuesday moment of zen.
The old Caldwell County jail, seen from the fence at the edge of the lot, Lockhart, Texas. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Photos, Texas, zen
Posted: 5:38 am Tue September 14 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad mends your robbing ways
Coming Through: 1905 — Mmmm, trains.
Testing, the Chinese Way — (Via willyumtx.)
Family win $1.5 million in autism-vaccine payout — If you read this story carefully, there seems to be a legitimate thread of science in it given that a rare genetic disorder is involved, but the anti-vaxers are going to run hard with this as if it were applicable across the general population.
Anthropology and Changing Myths vs. “Eternal” Scripture — Ah, Truth as an absolute. So much of the world would be so much more peaceful if people could let of that conviction. (Via lt260.)
Challenge to Hate Crimes Act Dismissed — Once again with that weird idea some conservatives hold that being limited in their expressions of bigotry and discrimination is itself a form of bigotry and discrimination.
Tom Ross, Delaware GOP Chair, Threatened With ‘Bullet In The Head’ — Once more we hear the reasonable, measured tones of conservative rhetoric at work.
Newt Gingrich Is So Off, He’s Not Even Wrong — This story in regard to Gingrich’s bizarre remarks about Obama’s alleged African socialism. Of course, the headline is generally applicable, along the lines of “Sun rises in east.” More on this from Ta-Nehisi Coates, examining the underlying assumptions.
Intolerance — Park51 and Islam in America, as we betray our own values.
The Talibanization of America — Viewed from Pakistan, the rise of U.S. Islamophobia looks depressingly familiar. Another wonderful gift from your Republican Party and the American conservative movement.
?otD: Have you been taught how to play Monopoly and how to sing in the rain?
9/14/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1.5 hours (Kalimpura)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.0 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: 251.2
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 2/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently reading: Worldshaker by Richard Harland
Tags: Culture, healthcare, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Religion, Science, trains
Posted: 5:36 am Tue September 14 2010 | Comments(0) |
[books|writing] Kalimpura milestone
Kalimpura, the third Green book, is now a complete outline. It’s off to first readers before I inflict it on arcaedia and casacorona next week. Yay!
Now on to a Sekrit Projekt novelette.
Tags: Books, Green, Kalimpura, Writing
Posted: 4:08 pm Mon September 13 2010 | Comments(0) |
« Older Posts | Newer Posts »