Archives for posts with tag: advice

In The Event of a Loss of Street Cred

June 17, 2011 //
0

I must be crazy. I’ve chosen to give up not only alcohol for thirty days, but caffeine as well. What’s that sound, you ask? It’s just me crying, as I realize they’re never going to let me back in the Raymond Chandler Society after a stunt like this.

To be honest with myself, and you, dear reader, I feel better for having yanked the drips out of both arms. Intellectually, at any rate – my meat body is doing some weird shit. I’m craving sugar for the first time in years, and have inherited the unfortunate habit of micronapping at minorly career-inopportune moments. But energy levels are returning to normal and my stomach has cleaned up its act a bit; I no longer feel like half a loaf of walking suck. Alcohol consumption is down 94% by my count (the remaining 6% was a sip of beer and a glass of wine at some point), and I feel pleased by that.

By the way – if you’re ever off the firewater and still want to get that old-timey cocktail feeling, try a Southampton:

“The Southampton”
Fill a glass with ice, add tonic water to fill, squeeze in half a lime, three dashes of bitters. Serve with lime wheel.

Mornings are still tough. I never realized how much I got, spiritually, out of having a cup of coffee in the mornings. It wasn’t about some Elysian Folgers sunrise moment. It was about having the opportunity to grumble, to feel held down by The Man, and to take refuge in having the one jolt of slightly morally-tinged stimulant that unites all souls of good, honest working men the world over as they claw bloody nails against the drudgery of another day in the pit for wages.

My next thought: What a load of crap. I sit behind a desk and work on video games. Seriously. I don’t even write them or test them directly. I write plans, schedules, specifications and communications about stuff that’s about video games. What am I complaining about? By extension, what have I got to drink / smoke / caffeineate about? Not that I wouldn’t enjoy that cup of coffee, but something feels like a great big phony about it.

This past Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I participated in a three-day “Startup Weekend” in an attempt to see if I could wrestle value out of something that didn’t carry the safety net of a salary. The results? Mixed. People liked my idea, I recruited a team of eight, we worked and got a prototype running, but at the end, we didn’t make the dramatic bridge leap to freedom, instead crashing the car into a wall of cynical investors. Ultimately, we didn’t win anything for our efforts and our startup went largely ignored by the local Twittermedia that was covering the event. BOOOOO!

This, plus the recent rejection of Hash is enough to make me feel ready to go back to life’s drawing board and figure out what I’m doing wrong.

Probably just need to throw more darts.

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Categories Digital Life and Misadventures, Writing and Bookish Things

Hash, Rejected: Eggs, Baskets, and Dartboards

June 9, 2011 //
2

Exactly three months to the day after submitting Hash to Angry Robot Books for their March Open Submissions Month, I got back the dreaded form letter:

Dear Sir, [REDACTED] decided not to take your manuscript to the next stage [REDACTED] wish you the [REDACTED] in placing your manuscript elsewhere [ETC].

Well.

It has been my profound privilege and pleasure participating, of course, and waiting these three months has been something of a quiet adventure of its own; maybe a bit like having a mildly venomous snake loose somewhere in your apartment complex: if not a constant reminder of your own mortality, certainly a topic for light conversation and idle concern as you tuck yourself into bed at night.

And, let’s not forget about the lessons learned in constructing a good pitch, and the realities of staring down a statistically improbable prospect such as publishing a book in the first place. I am indebted to friends, family, and colleagues along the way, and would like to wish you all good night, and in your own endeavors, the very best of luck.

*click*

Okay. Is this thing off? Is the press conference over?

Good. Because I’m not happy. I’m pissed.

Not at Angry Robot. They’ve got a great stable of writers and books – they need to be selective, especially when taking a chance like an Open Door Submissions month. To even give me that consideration is huge of them and if it comes around again I intend to jump at the chance. I’m not angry with them – how could I be?

I’m angry with myself. I spent three months waiting around, with this one book in this one basket (whose own stated odds were – literally – four-in-one-thousand), hoping against all hope, oh-maybe-that-Mister-DeMille-will-pick-me and I’d be the next leading man on the New Talkie.

That was stupid. And let this be a lesson to everyone so you don’t make the same mistake: don’t spend your time hoping. Yes, hope is the great social bearer’s bond – it floats nations in crisis, drives revolutions against despots, saves lives in the face of tragedy, and, modulated through the right kinds of speakers can actually summon Batman. But it’s also like guilt - it’s something we do to make ourselves feel better that we’re not doing something more useful.

If you slapped the writer filter on and scanned over my last ninety days, you’ll find I did nothing to write a sequel, nothing to solicit agents, nothing to polish a third draft of Hash, and outside of my one short story, no other fiction writing at all. I just sat there and hoped. I look at today’s markets for digital and print content – all of them - as something of a dartboard. I threw one dart, hoping to hit a bullseye.

Probably not the best plan.

Time is the most valuable thing you have. If you want to be succesful in an endeavor, you need to use that time. I’m not saying I regret the time I spent with family and friends. I’m not saying I regret the passion I poured into my work in other areas. But I regret being myopic, regret holding an outdated notion of being discovered in today’s self-reliant, asymmetric, fragmented neo-tribal world.

If Hash is going to succeed, I need to really pour in the energy to help it along - that means meeting the right people, pitching it to the right people, rewriting it to sell, and working on The Next One and The One After That with reckless disregard for my current book’s success or failure. Because this really is up to me. More, now than ever, our success or failure is in our hands.

Ultimately, I’m not upset that I got a rejection letter. I’m upset that by spending three months of my life waiting, I only got one.

Man, did I pick the wrong week to quit drinking.

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things

On Going from Fire Water to Just Water

June 7, 2011 //
3

It had to happen sometime. I’m giving myself a break from the booze. It’s got very little to do with being a writer (I am, in fact, going to be depriving myself of fully one-quarter of the Writer’s Food Pyramid) but there’s enough traffic that doesn’t need to be bothered with this on my Alter Ego’s site that I had might as well associate it here.

The reasons for this? Health-based, mostly. Just like cutting out caffeine after noon, this, like just about every health choice I make, is about trying to settle what, in polite terms, I’d have to call a somewhat dramatic digestive system. Like, two-time-Academy-Award-Winning dramatic. About this time a couple years ago, also at Microsoft, I got into a stressbound spiral, where food that entered me consistently and suddenly exited – depending on a script the director didn’t let me see – either stage up or stage down. It kept me guessing, let me tell you. Kept the doctors guessing, too, until I left Microsoft and suddenly all that crap cleared up.

Until now. I thought I was free, but it looks like it’s Oscar Season again.

To damp the fires down a bit, this one’s not nearly as debilitating as the first time, as I’d like to think I learned fairly well what my stressors were over that particular job. But, I’m searching for answers. Everything from stress to spinach to celiac to colitis to gall bladder blockage has been up the flagpole. I’m sure stress is a part of it, but I’ve noticed there’s something in common with both scenarios: alcohol. Now that I’m off antibiotics, alcohol is the next best contender for the muse that’s been giving my theatre-trained stomach its lessons in method acting.

As much as I hate to deprive anyone of their one true dream, I’m being mercifully honest when I tell you my stomach’s solo of Lear-on-the-Heath sucks, and I think we’ll all be done a favor if I hustle it off the stage and pack it a bindle back to Waukeegan. We’ll deal with refunds after the program, thanks.

On to business.

Some Principles

(or, “How does This Subject Not Carry a Stigma?)

1. This isn’t a self-intervention. I did not wake up in a gutter and make some kind of starry-brained decision that my life needed to flip an ethanol-free bitch. It’s a Tuesday. We all make reasonable decisions on Tuesdays. Right along with my decisions to have curry for lunch, follow up on a few emails after 3PM, and cancel tomorrow’s Shiproom meeting, I’m deciding to take a break from alcohol.

2. This isn’t spiritual. It isn’t even metaphysical. Having a drink is fun and relaxing. It’s not fun or relaxing to give it up. Hell, it’s plain uncomfortable. It doesn’t appear to be helping my chi, it doesn’t give me a boost to my self-esteem, and has, as far as I can tell, very little to do with God in any way - more to do with my brain deciding not to put certain liquids down my gullet. In fact, I know this is going to be uncomfortable for those around me. My apologies in advance. My advice to you? If you drink, keep on drinking. The poker party later this month is going to have a full bar, so take advantage.

3. This isn’t automatically so fantastically good for my body. Laying off moderate consumption of alcohol isn’t going to turn me into Lance Armstrong, and a lot of the quackery around body toxicity theories is just that – quackery. I expect my tolerance to go down, and as for the rest, we’ll see if it’s good for my body – more specifically, my gut. That’s the point of this whole exercise. If I don’t see a change after 30 days, I’m going to cross alcohol off my suspects list and have a martini while I’m going over the case notes. That’s how this is going to work.

4. This would be great as an all-or-nothing deal, but it won’t be. I’m being realistic here. Some way, some how, I’ll end up having booze in the next month. It’ll be a business thing, or a romantic dinner, or whatever else. And that sounds fine. The goal of this exercise is to cut out most of my drinking to see if it mostly helps my gut feel better. If I see enough of a correlation, I’ll know we’re onto something, then we’ll move on to whatever approach stabilizes me at the right mix of digestive health and enjoyable drinking.

Action Items for Friends and Family

1. Seriously, bring alcohol to the poker party. I’m relying on you to help everyone else get their drinking done and done right.

2. Do not tell me you’re happy I did this, that you’re proud of me or that “this is a good step”. I’m going to skip out on the validation part of this exercise; I’m staring down the barrel of thirty; I don’t need to hear I drew a pretty picture with my decision crayons.

3. Do not suggest other things I could do to “get better”. If I hear the terms colonic, high colonic, trans fat, exercise, or de-stress, something’s going out a window. De-stress isn’t even a word.

And last but not least – if you’re a drinker, keep drinking. In my deepest, darkest, most secret of hearts (well, the one I’m willing to blog with, at any rate), I’m quietly hoping alcohol isn’t the culprit. Instead, I dream that I’ll get a doctor’s note claiming I suffer from a little-known ”Vacation Deficit Disorder”, wherein my gut simply doesn’t engineer enough digest-y bits and I’ll need employer-sponsored vacations every month or so to, you know, get back up to 100%. Well, whichever way it goes, I hope to be back playing the gin fiddle with you all in short order.

I’ve just got to find the little bastard responsible for booking my stomach on the Charlie Sheen Opener tour, kick down its door, tear up its contract, and make myself clear beyond clear that it’s never going to work in this town again.

Bright lights of Broadway, my ass.

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Categories Digital Life and Misadventures, Writing and Bookish Things

For the Love of God, Have Someone Else Look at your Pitch (48 Hours Left)

March 7, 2011 //
4

I start today’s post off with an image; one that reminds us that many ideas – such as Holland’s ChocoVine, “The taste of Dutch chocolate and fine red wine” – look a lot better to their creators than they do to the outside world.

I cannot stress enough: if you’re pitching a book – like I’m doing with Hash for Angry Robot Books’ Open Submissions Month – for the love of almighty God, have someone else look at your pitch before you send it.

I’m not trying to say your ideas are bad. I’m trying to say you, as the author, have no idea whether they’re bad or not. You’ve been in that damned writing cave until your eyes went white and you started navigating by your overgrown nose hairs. You’ve got two, three drafts, and at the end your pen has dragged right off the edge so it looks like THE ENDRRRGGH__ I’m saying it’s time to step out of the cave before you try to paint your dreams for the outside world.

It’s about stepping out of the cave. It’s about coming to the realization that you are not the ultimate arbiter of your own work. It’s about testing your work against those who are either closer to your consumer than you are, or closer to success as an author than you are.

I had the good fortune to bounce my work off an old hand, one who had plenty to say and no compunction in making the stakes plain. Among the gems:

On The Twenty-Five Word “Pitch Tag”:

This isn’t Lolita; who cares about your character in twenty-five words? Tell me the UNIQUE IDEA.

On Character Biographies:

Don’t tease in a character biography line. Either lay out how the character contributes to the plot, or cut it.

On Semicolons in a Pitch:

I seriously want to strangle you right now, Charles. Keep your semicolons in your prose and out of this pitch.

The Crux of the Biscuit

In the end, he really laid it down nice and neat. Pitch writing isn’t prose writing. It’s closer to newspaper copy than anything else. For a prose writer, that’s a transition that’s damn near anathema – but you have to do it. You’re writing to convey the greatest effect in the fewest words for an audience that has no time to waste.

And when I say no time, just look at the numbers. By Angry Robot Books guidelines, you’ve got two pages to truly explain your book – stinger, characters, and entire synopsis – before the first line of prose even enters the equation, and the way you do that – for good or for awful – means the difference between the readers getting to your sweet, sweet prose…or just pitching the whole dripping mess in the big unfolding whipsaw shredder they bring out for open season.

Now, I don’t mean to put words in the mouth of Angry Robot’s crew; they could be far more generous than all that, and ready to give endless sums of their readers’ and editors’ time to pitches that dawdle, linger on self-congratulation, or spin off into M.C. Escher-land.

But I doubt it.

Remember – Be Nice

If you do choose to sit your pitch down in front of a pro, need I remind you to be gracious with the feedback that’s given? I hear it’s a common occurrence for writers to spend much otherwise productive editing time voraciously defending their choices. I can’t think of a worse idea than looking a gift review in the mouth, and yet it happens.

These folks are your audience, and in the case of pro writers, decorated soldiers in the army you hope one day to join. Maverick or no, you have intellectual betters that have plenty to teach you simply by their sheer tenure, let alone the tenacity and skill it took them to break out just like you hope to do. Respect.

If you need any more reason to be nice to your reviewer, consider this: my reviewer, a well-tuned and veteran SF author, after thrashing through the pitch and honing it down to gleaming, bristling nerve and bone, turned toward me and said: “Your stuff’s good. It has a voice, it’s like Philip K. Dick but for today’s audience.” And then, before I could stammer out a thank you, he wrote it in a recommendation. Talk about speechless. I’m pretty sure I went out of there drooling, vowing endless gifts of eighteen-year-old Scotch to the writing gods.

I’m saying, get your pitch reviewed. And be nice to your reviewers. It really comes back to you. As for me – I’ve got about 48 hours left to get this pitch fixed up. By the way, if you’re wondering if a pitch review helps with the terror of rejection – it doesn’t. I’ve got shakes bad enough to mix concrete with.

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things