Journal

Yesterday was my favourite kind of winter morning. Cold enough that it was pleasurable to hide beneath the blankets for a while; warm enough that I could get up, shower, then spend the morning without shoes and socks on as I padded worked on the laptop. I like having cold feet as I work. It’s a thing.

Six assignments marked yesterday, bringing me to the halfway point.

On Friday, I took a break from marking and took my partner out to lunch at a nearby dumpling bar we’d been meaning to try for ages. There was far too much noise and far too vegetarian options for it to be a particularly effective date,  but over spring roles S. asked if I was getting any of my own writing done amid the marking.

I’m not, but writing is a particularly weird thing. There’s no words on the page happening, but the days spent toiling in the marking minds are usually fertile ground for coming up with new ideas or figuring out details I’ve been stuck on for a while.

This time around I’ve been pondering a novella idea I’ve been kicking around, based upon the Warhol Sleeping vignettes I’ve published over the years, and how it needs to change given that those vignettes were written in 2000 or so when television was still the dominant means of distributing content. It presumes a rating system as a meaningful measure of success, and a type of cultural dominance that is largely impossible to achieve given the fragmented and customisable nature of content distributed via the internet.

Intriguingly, the core idea at the heart of the vignettes–a search for authenticity in art and counter-cultural thought–is still relevant. It just needs to be handled differently than it was back in 2000, and I need to update the storytelling approach in order to reflect that. I’m toying with ways to do this in the back of my brain at the moment, figuring out how to do new POVs while keeping the core conceits that I like.

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There are things you start to notice when you read a whole bunch of works-in-progress at once.

For instance, there are certain beginnings to a story that just don’t work, but aren’t apparent unless you’re the kind of person who reads slush or marks a shit-ton of creative writing assignments. Every time I mark, I’m reminded of the inevitable evil that is the story that begins with a character waking up. Everything I wrote about this subject back in 2014’s post on The World’s Worst Story Opening (and How to Do It So it Works) remains staggeringly true today.

I’m snarky in that post, as I often am when frustrated, but its a phase writers go through in their development. First, you get into the habit of figuring out things on the page. Then, you get into the habit of figuring out scenes, learning the patterns of story and how to handle the microstructures of conflict development. The latter isn’t easy, and it’s rarely talked about in any great detail–Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid entry on Beats is one of the few pieces of writing advice I’ve seen that talks about the internal structure of scenes rather than using scenes to generate a macro-structure like the three-act narrative arc.

Another resource I’ve used over the years: Lit Reactor’s post on punctuating dialogue, which walks us through the basics before talking about how dialogue can be used to control pacing and achieve other effects.

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If there’s a flaw in the rise of the gig economy, it’s that people are often doing some shallow engagement with their job rather tan specialising. This may not seem like a big deal–the most popular of the gig-economy set-ups are built to manage food delivery, driving, and other gigs with a low barrier of entry–but occasionally you get reminders of exactly what that means.

Like yesterday, when we ordered up a pizza from one of the delivery apps, only to have it dropped off by a rider who didn’t realise that pizza isn’t designed to be transported vertically.

Irritating as hell when it happened. My partner’s response as I curried the pizza into the room: “What kind of monster does that?”

I had no answer, but at least it’s slightly funnier now, twenty-four hours later. Largely because a series of complaints and photographic evidence resulted in a full refund of the meal.

I really should go mark things now.

I followed a link to an open call from a new publishing company today. They set up writers guidelines telling prospective writers what they’d like to see submitted, but neglected to mention a pay rate. The comments thread on their submission guidelines involved two people asking about pay rates explicitly, and both times the editor/publisher ducked the question.

I closed the page at that point.

I won’t call out the actual publisher that did this, because they’re not alone in this particular habit. I’ve spent years looking at writers guidelines as a writer, with another five years working the Australian Writers Marketplace where checking guidelines was part of the job. The good ones tend to put the word counts accepted and pay rates in easy to find places. By and large, when figuring out whether to submit somewhere as a short fiction writer, those two things will influence your decision more than anything else.

The very good ones – which often translates as goddamn professionals that are a pleasure to work with — will put it right up the top before you look at anything else. There is nothing I hate so much as reading 1,000 words of an anthology’s guidelines, outlining all the things the editor looks for, only to discover the important details are half-hidden at the end. I can understand the logic of this, but some writers just aren’t going to submit for a handful of cents a word regardless of how cool the theme is.

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I had three classes worth of assignments to mark land on my desk on Tuesday. About 180,000 words. or two novels worth, of fiction. As of 4:00 PM today, I’ve finished the first class, which means i’m skipping the customary week of procrastination and processing this round surprisingly rapidly.

Unfortunately, this fit of organisation does little to curb my grumpiness about the whole process. Largely this is a function of the online submission interface, which means doing simple line edits is an incredibly complex process compared to just using a red pen.

On the plus side, I have finished enough that I can justify taking a night off to run our regular Superhero RPG this evening. The players are scheduled to face an evil psychic and his mind-controlled mob, but the PC in charge will be away due to the player being away.

Invariably, this means things will get worse for the team without me doing a damn thing to provoke it. The players in this particular game have a talent for that…