Category: Editorial

MiniCon 46, Con Report

written by David Steffen

Yes, con season is in full swing once again. As usual, over Easter weekend, Minicon has come to the Twin Cities. Charles Stross was originally scheduled to be the writer guest of honor, but family medical emergencies caused him to bow out (good news: according to Stross’s blog, the prognosis is excellent. Hooray!). He called in his friend, writer John Scalzi. The music guest of honor was local Chas Somdahl. There was no artist guest of honor (I never did hear why).

So here is my con report for Minicon 46 of 2011. Just to warn you, this won’t be a full description of everything happening there because:
-I’m not a particularly social person. I do all right with people I already know, but not so much with crowds of those I don’t. In theory, it should be easier at a con, since I obviously have shared interests with these folks, but I still have trouble with it. So, most of my time was spent in the programming portions of the con.
-Also, as usual Minicon hits too near the end of the semester when everything is super busy. I spent the prior two weekends in my office doing schoolwork. I expect to spend the next two weekends in my office doing schoolwork. I haven’t been able to spend as much time with my family as I would’ve liked recently, so rather than spend nearly every hour at the con I tried to decide ahead of time which programming events were can’t-miss so that I could come home during other times.

Anyhoo, on with the con report.

Friday

I had to work on Friday and, well, I didn’t peruse the schedule ahead of time as closely as perhaps I should have. I knew the opening ceremonies were at 7, but hadn’t realized there was programming that happened after the opening ceremonies. On my way to the registration desk, I ran into about four people I already knew. This was a much better start than the previous year where every single person was a stranger.

So I went to the opening ceremony. Chas gave a very entertaining opening song about the life of a guitar player. The main art for the con was awesome, a guitar-shaped spaceship with Minneapolis perched upon it, flying to Venus. Neat mix of different idea. The OTHER art was also very entertaining, John Scalzi’s head in a water-filled jar, Futurama presidents style, to fit the theme “Not Yet Dead From the Neck Up”.

Panels

I just hit one panel on Friday, “Whose Sketch Is It Anyway?” Neat idea, members of the audience start a sketch and hand it off to the artist folk up front. Cute idea, worked well enough. Cute kids there to help keep stuff light too.

PNH and the Deaftones

Music! Tor editors Patrick and Teresa Nielsen have a band called PNH and the Deaftones. Apparently the word “deaf” is actually accurate, as they said both Teresa and their other band member (whose name I didn’t catch) are deaf. They say well enough, with Patrick playing guitar and all three singing. It was a fun time, and afterward I chatted with Teresa for a while. She’s a very nice person with lots of fun stories; ask her about the roast of Harlon Ellison at the first Minicon she attended.

Saturday

Panels

I went to the panels “Short Stories and the People Who Love Them”, “Non-Western Cultures in Fantasy”, both fine panels, no complaints.

For me the highlight of the weekend was “Live Model Drawing”. Awesome. They provided art supplies, and two volunteer models: con co-chair Joel Phillips in a leather kilt, and a woman who volunteered, in fantasy garb. It was great! I’ve been trying to do some sketching on the side, but usually I don’t have models posing for me. I’ve sketched Heather a couple times but usually she only sits still long enough if I catch her napping, and with her I worry what she’ll think of the outcome. “No dear, your head is not actually lopsided; that’s just my lack of skill on display.” So it was nice to have an hour to just sit and draw people. Here are pictures of how it turned out. Look at the bottom of this page to see the sketches I made.

And then I caught the John Scalzi Reading. With permission of Stross, he read the opening of Stross’s upcoming book “Rule 34”. It was reasonably good, I probably won’t pick it up, but it wasn’t bad. Then Scalzi read a chapter from a book he has slated for 2012, about…. Aw crap, Scalzi said that I can’t tell anyone or he will know about it, and send his wife to kick my ass. I’ve learned from experience that Scalzi hears all, and I’d rather avoid a late night pummeling from Mrs. Scalzi, so I guess I’ll keep my mouth shut. But when the book comes out, I’ll jump up and down and wave my arms and recommend it because it is awesome. After The Book Which Must Not Be Named he read from an April Fool’s novel excerpt titled “The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City.” Hilarious! Even more hilarious is that many people took the announcement seriously. Including someone in Hollywood who called his agent expressing interest. Ha!

Sunday

Panels

Panel: “Common Misconceptions About Publishing”, with Patrick and Teresa. Lots of good information though I’d heard most of it elsewhere before. Got a chance to talk to Patrick and Teresa afterward for a while longer. More good stories, including some real examples of what NOT to do. For instance, when submitting artwork, one normally sends in prints through the mail or send a website. Some artists insist on showing up at the office with the determined stance “My art doesn’t reproduce well.” Well, if that’s true, it’s a wee problem for book printing, unless you intend to hand paint every print!

And the other: “The Works of John Scalzi”. Since I’ve only read part of one short story by Scalzi I didn’t have much to contribute to the discussion. It was fine though, lots of audience participation.

Readings: And I hit three quick readings by local authors. Michael Merriam, Dana M. Baird, and Marissa Lingen. These are folks in the local writer’s group MinnSpec, which I’ve been meaning to get more involved in, so it was nice to hear some of their work.

Closing Ceremony

A nice wrapup, mostly based around thanking everyone who contributed their hard work. At this point I realized how much cool stuff I had missed, both through my brief time there and by not exploring the con suite and other peripheral areas more thoroughly. Most interesting thing that I completely missed was the medallion search, a trivia-based hunt for 1973 pennies scattered about the hotel. Some of the clues were fairly simple but some of them were amazingly hard! Next year I should see if I can puzzle out one or two.

Also, the Hugo nominations were announced once they were posted online at Renovation. I was particularly excited about a few. Moshe Feder for Best Editor, Long Form–he was here for Minicon 45, and I gave my first novel pitch to him, very nice. Dan Dos Santos for his art–I met him at Minicon 45, a very nice guy and I bought a portrait by him of Moiraine Damodred. Peter Watts’ short story “The Things” in Clarkesworld, and Clarkesworld itself for semiprozine. Good luck everyone, but those most of all!

And with that my con weekend was over. Next year I won’t be in school anymore, so hopefully I’ll be able to hit Minicon 47 more thoroughly.

Noms: John W. Campbell (and Hugo)

written by David Steffen

Hello, everyone! I wanted to bring to your attention that this is the first year that I am eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. My eligibility opened up because of publication of my story “Turning Back the Clock” in Bull Spec #3, so I figured I’d pander a bit for nominations, and while I’m at it, Hugo noms.

How can I vote?

Nominations–You can vote any time between now and March 26th. You are eligible to vote if you had an attending/supporting membership to last year’s World SF convention (AussieCon) or this year’s World SF convention (Renovation). You don’t actually have to attend to be able to vote–you can buy a “supporting” membership for $50. When you’re ready to vote the online or print ballots are available here. You can nominate 0-5 entries for each category. A list of categories is also available at that link.

Voting–Some time after the nomination round votes are counted, they’ll open up for the main voting. You’re eligible for this only if you’re an attending supporting member of this year’s World SF convention (Renovation)–not the difference in eligibility rules from the nomination round. There’s no link yet, but presumably it will be in a similar place to the nomination voting ballot.

What Categories?

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

I (David Steffen) am eligible for this one because of my qualifying sale to Bull Spec, for “Turning Back the Clock”. I think that any of my stories can be taken into consideration for this. If you want to read some of my work, most is available for free in some format, linked from my biblio page.

Best Short Story

I have two stories this year eligible for nomination:

“What Makes You Tick” in War of the Worlds:Â Frontlines. This was also reprinted in Brain Harvest where you can read it for free.

“Turning Back the Clock” in Bull Spec. You can get a PDF of the issue here for an optional donation.

Best Professional Artist/Best Fan Artist

Our resident artist Joey Jordan can be nominated for either of these categories. Her Bull Spec work qualifies for professional work, but she may also have other things eligible for fan art category. You can also check out her own web page.

Best Fan Writer

This could apply to anyone who has written nonfiction for Diabolical Plots in the last year, especially me (David Steffen) and Frank Dutkiewicz.

Best Fanzine

Diabolical Plots itself should be eligible for this.

Website Spotlight: Kongregate

written by David Steffen

I came across a very fun website recently, on the recommendation of Nathaniel Lee (of Mirrorshards fame). The site is called Kongregate and it’s an ever-growing collection of online mini-games. I’m not sure how I haven’t heard of it–it’s been around for a few years. Kongregate is more than just your run-of-the-mill game site. Not only are the games clever and fun,the site has an overarching Achievements system to make everything all the more fun. Most or all of the games are made by indie developers, and I love that this site provides a showcase for their abilities.

When you view a game you can view a list of achievements you can reach by playing this game. They may be things that you would normally do while playing the game anyway like “pass levels 1-5” or they could be something extra that you wouldn’t have thought of if not for the Achievement list. Each achievement is worth a certain amount of points, and higher points upgrade the level of your account. To take full advantage of this, you just have to register for the site which is free and you don’t have to give away any important information to sign up.

According to their “About Us” page, indie developers can upload their games quickly and easily, and the most popular games end up on the home page. The developers retain full rights to their creations (which is great) and also get a share of the advertising and donation revenues. The site provides a lot of extras for them too, such as keeping a persistent list of high scores and player achievements. It sounds like a really great place for indie developers to get their games out to the world.

A Few of the Games

And, here are a few of the games on there that I found the most fun. There is a wide variety of games there, so if these don’t suit your fancy, odds are that something else will.

Amorphous+

My favorite that I’ve found. In this one you’re a blob hunter trying to clear out “gloople” hives. Your weapon: a person-sized meat cleaver. The controls are very simple, the characters walks towards the mouse, and swings his blade wide on a left-click. The first enemies you come against are harmless, little green blobs that will knock you off balance if they bump into you. There are more than a dozen different kinds of blobs, each requiring a different strategy, from the Melties that splash acid everywhere when you splat them, or the Biters that pounce straight at you with teeth flashing. This is a great game, fun and very challenging. One important tip: Use a real mouse. Playing this game with a laptop touchpad really kills the wrist.

Continuity

This is a very close 2nd that I’ve found so far, a very clever little game, a side-scroller puzzle solver with a structure based on those sliding puzzle games that I so rarely solve. You know the type I’m talking about–you have a rectangular grid of rectangles, each with an image, and one of the smaller rectangles is missing so that you can slide the tiles around until you form a larger image out of the tiles. This game isn’t exactly like that because the goal is not to make a big picture. You control a stick figure that exists within this grid of squares and your objective is to collect a key and bring it to the exit door to pass the level. You can rearrange the squares to rearrange the level, but you can only pass from one square to another if the walls along their common edge match up with each other. You pass through each level by alternately controlling the figure and rearranging the level (during which time the figure is frozen in place). The first levels make a good tutorial and seem almost too easy, but the difficulty quickly picks up and things get much more interesting.

The Company of Myself

Another fun side-scroller puzzle solver. In this case you control a self-professed hermit who must find a way to reach the exit door in each level. Okay, so that’s pretty straightforward, but what makes it interesting is his ability to create shadow selves–if you walk around the level, do any action, then press spacebar, then you’ll be brought back to the beginning and a shadow of you will replay your previous actions, requiring you to figure out how to work with your self phased across time to solve the puzzles. There’s a storyline attached to this one, but I thought it was pretty corny.

Gamma Bros.

A neo-retro space shooter game. You can move freely around the screen and fire in the four cardinal directions. A multitude of alien spaceships attack from every direction. This is old-school game challenging, no holds barred. I have not beat this game, but I’ve had a lot of fun losing.

Robot Wants Ice Cream

A side-scroller action game. You controller a little robot up against an army of attacking robots in your quest to find ice cream. The fun of this game comes from seeking out all the upgrades, allowing you to jump higher, upgrade weaponry, and even to fly. Just challenging enough to be fun.

Other Tron-related media

written by David Steffen

Even after watching the original Tron movie, and playing the Tron 2.0 game, you’re still not satisfied and you just want more and more?

Tron (Arcade Game)

The same year the original Tron movie was released, a coin operated arcade game was released with the same title. It consisted of 4 mini-games based on the film:

Light Cycles: A top-down view of the famous light cycle game, where the player drives a motorcycle-like vehicle that leaves a solid wall behind it. The object is to make all of your opponents crash into walls.
MCP Cone: A simulation of the final battle of the movie against the MCP, trying to get past its protective plates to the MCP core.
Battle Tanks: Driving a tank, and destroying enemy tanks in a maze level.
I/O Tower: A simulation of the scene in the movie, trying to get into the I/O Tower.

I was too young to play this when it first came out, but I did play it in an arcade in the late 80s, and I thought it was fun. If you want to play it and you happen to have an Xbox 360, then you’re in luck, as you can download a demo for free or buy a full version at Xbox Marketplace.

Discs of Tron

The Tron arcade game was originally supposed to include 5 mini-games, but the fifth wasn’t included in time for the game’s release. The fifth game was released separately in 1983, titled “Discs of Tron”. In the game you face off against Sark playing a game shown in the movie, where two opponents on platforms made of concentric rings and throw energy pellets at each other, trying to destroy your opponent’s platform.

Again, I was too young to play this when it came out, and I didn’t see this in an arcade later. If you want to play this one, it is also available for download on Xbox Marketplace.

Tron:Â Ghost in the Machine

Tron also inspired a 6 part comic book series, released between 2006 and 2008. It is a direct sequel to the Tron 2.0 game. It takes place 6 months after the events of the game, following the same protagonist, Jet Bradley, who is still trying to get over the trauma he experience, after having been zapped into the game world.

I was unaware of this comic until I was looking up material for this article, but now I am looking forward to picking up a copy for myself. You can buy individual issues at Amazon or you can order the collection that combines the 6 issues into one volume.

Tron:Â Evolution

And with the release of the Tron Legacy movie next month, there’s a cross-console game tie-in. The game is released on December 7th, the movie on December 17th, so you can sort of get a sneak peak. It occurs before the events of the movie and provides some of the basis for the events of the movie. I have mixed feelings about this–the same thing was tried for the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movie. On the one hand, it was kind of neat to see some characters and hints of events before they’re revealed in the movie, but it came off as more of a marketing gimmick than actual value added.

You can’t get the game quite yet, but you can check out the official site. Once the game’s available, you should have no trouble whatsoever finding it.

Kingdom Hearts 2 level:Â Space Paranoids

You may have seen my review of Kingdom Hearts back in January. The second game was pretty much more of the same, but with more worlds to explore. One of the worlds was “Space Paranoids”, a Tron world. This was probably my favorite world of the game, especially since Sora and his friends Donald Duck and Goofy get dressed up in Tron fashion, which was pretty neat. Tron the character was available as a temporary companion to join the group as a fighter, and it was also fun to see the incarnations of the Heartless enemies.

You should be able to find the game used in a variety of places, and you can check out the game’s official website.

Southpark episode:Â You Have 0 Friends

This is one of my favorite episodes of Southpark, released earlier this year as part of season 14. Stan’s friends start a Facebook account for Stan as a surprise. Stan doesn’t want an account, because he doesn’t want to get “sucked in”, but one by one, his friends and relatives guilt trip him into adding them, as they take his lack of Facebook interaction as a sign that he isn’t a good friend. Before he knows it, he has a million friends, and the demands just get more and more. Finally he decides to just delete his account, but Facebook won’t let him do it, zapping him into the system Tron-style. Inside the system, he’s captured by guards similar to those in the movie, and everyone’s facebook account is dressed in Tron fashion. This episode was just awesome.

You can watch the whole episode for free on the Southpark Studios.

The Skill of Critiquing Part One: Guidelines for Etiquette

written by David Steffen

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, the number one way to improve your own writing is to read and critically evaluate other people’s writing. You don’t have an emotional attachment to their work as you do to your own. By learning to examine their work with a cold eye, you can learn what you like and don’t like in a story. Critiquing is a skill which is just as much based on social interaction as it is with prose examination. I’ve read critiquing advice elsewhere, which includes such statements as “don’t critique the critiquer” and “don’t rewrite the story for the author”, but here I have categorized and prioritized critiquing advice into larger categories, and split it between “how to critique” and “how to be critiqued”, as well as a couple of general statements.

I list them as rules here, but of course no one will be enforcing them but yourself. You can think of them as guidelines, if you like, but I do think that your critiquing will be more happy and productive, both for giving and receiving critiques, if you follow these guidelines.

How to critique

6 simple “rules”. Of course, there’s no one enforcing these, so there’s not really rules, but more guidelines of etiquette. I think your critiquing relationships will be much happier and more productive if you keep these in mind.

1. A Critique Should Help the Author

Bottom line, and without exception, the primary purpose of writing a critique should be to help the author. Anything that interferes with this should be avoided. I know, I suggested above that you should critique to improve your own skills, and that’s good too, but you can do that part while reading only, not writing critiques. When you write the critiques themselves, that is where these guidelines come into play. All of the other rules tie into this, the most important of all.

2. Don’t be a Dick

Resist the urge to compose nasty, antagonistic responses to a story, no matter how clever you think you are. If you feel a snark coming on, write a quick blog post to get it out of your system. No matter how little you liked the story, a real person wrote it. If you get your jollies off of trying to crush newbie writers’ fledgling hopes, you are in the wrong place. Writers have enough negativity to deal with, bearing the weight of all the rejections piled on them by editors (I’m not complaining about editors, they reject most submissions because they can’t buy everything, it’s just the way the system has to work), and they need anything but another source of negativity.

This ties into Rule #1, because a nasty, abusive response to a story does not help the author. By all means, tell the author, in detail, what you didn’t like about their story, but take a moment to consider how you want to say it. Keep your comments about the story itself, not about the author.

3. This is Not Your Story

Your objective as a critiquer is not to rewrite the story based on your own vision. Remember that this is not your story. Do NOT tell them to write a different story. Do NOT try to rewrite the story for them–I’ve actually received some critiques which literally rewrote a story from beginning to end for me, which is the farthest thing from helpful. Do NOT try to make their style fit your style. Your job is not to make it the best story you can write, but to make it the best story THAT story can be.

This ties into Rule #1, because if you try to rewrite the story yourself, then it is no longer the author’s story. Trying to do the author’s job for them is not helping the author.

4. Don’t be Afraid to Say What You Think

For a worthwhile critiquing relationship, it is your responsibility as a critiquer to express how you actually feel about the story. If you don’t feel comfortable with this, then you’re not ready for critiquing. The way I figure it, if I want to be certain of positive comments, I’ll share a story with my mom. If I want to get feedback that will help me improve the story, I’ll ask someone for a critique. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to express positive comments, only that all of your positive comments should be sincere. And always keep in mind Rule #2.

This ties into Rule #1, because a critiquer who is afraid to point out what they see as flaws in a story is not of much use. If the author asks for a critique, then they are asking for honest feedback, even if it is not positive.

5. Explain

Positive or negative, whatever you do, be specific, explain what you mean. “This story was great” or “This story was terrible”, neither one is particularly helpful, unless you go into more detail. You could say you liked the strong characters, or that you disliked the ending because it felt too improbable. You could say you thought the opening line was hilarious, or that the 2nd person narration was distracting. Just get specific (always keeping Rule #2 in mind). The worst of all vague comments is along the lines of “the writing could use some work.” If you think that’s the case, explain why. For instance, the sentence structure could not vary enough, the protagonist’s name is used too often, or pronouns are often used in a way which makes the antecedent unclear.

This ties into Rule #1, because vague comments are difficult to translate into actual story changes. Take the effort to convert vagueries into specifics, and your critique will have more effect.

6. Find the Good and the Bad

When you’re reading a story for critique, there may very well be tons of negative things you want to say, and as Rule #3 says, you ought to say them. But critiques don’t have to be all bad news. If there are aspects of the story that you liked, you should say those too. Don’t make up things that you like, just seek them out. Starting the critique off with positives and shifting to negatives seems to work pretty well; it establishes a set of story aspects that you don’t think need to change, giving a foundation for any future suggested changes to be built upon.

This ties into Rule #1, because it’s just as important for the writer to know what people liked as what they disliked. This way they can make more informed decisions about what to change and what to leave unchanged. Also, if a particular person always gives unrelentingly negative critiques, the writer may feel bad and may just stop sharing stories with them. By mixing in positive comments, you help maintain a balance with the writer, and maintain a happy critiquing relationship.

How to be critiqued

Some of these rules will be familiar, but seen from the other perspective

1. A Critique Should Help the Author

Yup, the same Rule #1, except in this case, the author is you. You can’t control what kind of critiques you will receive, but you can control how you react to them.

2. Don’t be a Dick

Not every critiquer who reads your work is going to follow any kind of etiquette. I like to use critique forums, but one drawback of them is that there is no entrance exam. Most people are generally trying to be helpful, but the occasional person is just a troll, plain and simple, trying to piss off as many people as they can manage. They may resort to personal insults, or may gleefully try to rip your story apart in the snarkiest way possible. Hopefully this won’t happen too often, but it will happen, and you need to keep your temper when you react. If something really gets you riled up, sometimes it’s better not to react at all: Don’t feed the trolls. Trolls generally act trollish because they want attention, and by responding with rants and raves, you are encouraging their behavior. If you do react, be polite, even though they don’t deserve it. If you can manage, you might just want to say something extremely short like “Thanks for reading and commenting.” If you think the person stepped way over the line, you might consider saying something very simple like “please direct your comments about the story, not about me,” but in general, it’s probably best to just keep quiet.

This ties into Rule #1 for a couple of reasons. First, it may affect other people’s opinions on the forum. If you fly off the handle and act like a troll in response to a nasty critique, then this may affect how likely people will be to read your stuff. Second, it’s just a waste of your energy and attentions. Trying to launch a writing career is generally a very demoralizing business, trying to stay afloat above the constant stream of form rejections. If you post in response to a troll, then you’ve already spent more energy than the communication is worth. It’s best to just move on.

3. This is Your Story

As you read critiques, remember that this is your story, not theirs. Of course you should fix outright grammar/spelling/continuity errors. But you shouldn’t follow any other advice without carefully considering it first. If a critiquer doesn’t like the ending, that doesn’t mean you have to change it. You’ve still gained something by learning how the ending might not to appeal to some people. This is still valuable information.

This ties into Rule #1 because you are the author, and the story is based on your vision. If they offered comments with good intentions, then they have provided a valuable service, but that does not mean you are obligated to follow their every whim. If you follow every suggestion blindly, it will become a story by committee, with all the appeal diluted to the equilibrium of the common vote. It’s good to get opinions from people with a variety of tastes, but if you feel the need to follow all of them, the result will be a bland mishmash, not the gleaming story you hope for.

4. You Don’t Always Need to Say What You Think

It’s the critiquer’s responsibility to say what they think, but that’s not true of the writer. What do you do if someone says a comment which you think is totally incorrect, maybe pointing out an aspect of the story that they see as a flaw, but you see as a strength? You don’t need to tell them you disagree, or that you’ll be disregarding their suggestion. This ties in closely with #3. You won’t be following every person’s advice, but you don’t need to point this out to them, and you don’t need to tell them where their critique is wrong.

This ties into Rule #1, because if you are constantly telling critiquers that you are not going to take their advice, they may come to the conclusion that their critiques are not being taken seriously, that you do not consider them valuable. And trying to convince a critiquer that their critique is wrong is a futile effort–critiques are opinions, not facts, and so they can’t really be wrong. They can just be wrong for your story.

5. Don’t Explain (Unless…)

Imagine that you’ve written a very complicated story, with a complicated plot, and a complicated setting. A critiquer responds and says that they just plain didn’t understand what was happening at any given time. They may ask you to explain. In general, it makes more sense not to explain.

This ties into Rule #1 because, when a story gets published, the reader generally does not have a direct line to the author to explain the parts they didn’t understand. The text must speak for itself, and if it doesn’t do so sufficiently, then the text itself may need to change. If the text can’t make sense without author’s explanation, then more work may need to be done to improve the story’s clarity.

That being said, there are times when explanation may be worthwhile. Using the example above about the critiquer not understanding what’s happening. If you want to make the plot possible to understand, but you’re not sure how, then it might be worthwhile to explain, to see if the critiquer has any ideas for how to bring your intended ideas out in a way that’s more clear to the reader.

General

And, just a couple things that you can keep in mind that don’t tie in very well with the previous categories.

1. Writing Skill is not Critiquing Skill

Although writing and critiquing are very closely related, skill in one does not imply skill in another. A great writer may not have sufficient practice in critiquing to pick apart how someone else’s story could be improved. And someone who has developed great skill in picking apart aspects of a story for critique may not have figured out how to fix these flaws, only how to spot them. When someone critiques your work, your instinct may be to weight their advice based on their publication history, but this is a bad instinct. Likewise, when critiquing someone else, you may be tempted to ignore flaws in their story if they are famous but, again, this defeats the purpose of critiquing at all. Each critique and each story should be taken on its own merits, regardless of the writing skill or publishing history of the person in question.

2. Turnabout

One way to help yourself follow these rules is to encourage critique exchanges, rather than one-sided critiques. In this way, you can both better learn where the strengths and weaknesses of the other person’s stories tend to lie, and you’ll be much less tempted to be a jerk if you know that the other person will have the opportunity to give you the same treatment.

3. Where to Critique?

Okay, so this isn’t so much a guideline, as a question that you might have asked yourself, that I will answer briefly.
Find a local in-person writer’s group. Most metropolitan areas will probably have one or more. My local speculative fiction writers group, for instance, is MinnSpec.
The easiest way to find people to critique you is to go to a critique forum like Baen’s Bar or Critters.
A bit more involved, and with more unpredictable returns is to arrange your own group, or just exchange critiques with individuals, perhaps via email. Stop by the forum of a writing forum or magazine forum, like the Writers of the Future forum, or Hatrack River.

The End that Ruins

We’ve all been there. You invest your time and money in a movie or read a book where, for most of the time you’re sitting there, you’re really enjoying it. It may not be the best you’ve ever read or seen, but you’re pretty sure you’d give it a thumb’s up to someone asking your opinion on it later. But when the ending arrives, you’re left with your jaw hanging open at how pointless, annoying, or just plain stupid the ending was, to the extent that it ruins the whole movie for you that the creators really couldn’t come up with something better than that. It really sticks in your mind, but not in a good way, and you’re left wandering the earth seeking out others who have experienced that movie or book so you can commiserate at what an incredibly stinky ending it was.

Well, this is a list of some of the most prominent examples of this from my movie and book experiences. Keep in mind that these are only examples of what I have personally come across, not the worst endings of all time. If you have any endings you’d like to complain about, I encourage you to leave them in the comments.

Obviously, this list will have lots of SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS GALORE , since there’s no way I can write a list complaining about endings which doesn’t tell you what the endings are. So if you’re worried about spoilers, maybe you should stop here, or you could scan the titles and only read the details for those you’ve read or don’t care about.

1. The Dark Tower

by Stephen King

Premise

A cowboy and friends travel a long, long way, facing insurmountable odds and traveling to many places (including Maine)Â just to find a big tall building for no apparent reason.

Overall

Yes, I’m sure it’s a shocker that Stephen King tops out the bad endings list, as he’s notorious for writing himself into corners and then writing whatever dumb resolution comes to mind at the time. Usually his ideas are great, his characters are well developed, and the ending most often invokes a WTF reaction. Which is why he gets the honor of having 4 stories in this top 10 list.

This series has spanned most of Stephen King’s career to date, the first novel “The Gunslinger” was serializeded in F&SF from 1978-1981 and the final novel was finally published in 2004. I generally liked the series, though I think book two “The Drawing of the Three” was my favorite. In the later books, there are major cases of Stephen King pretentiousness leaking into the story. By the time he hit mid-series he was famous enough that he could pretty much do whatever the hell he wanted, regardless of how stupid it was. This includes injecting himself as a character into the series of the book, revered as a god by the gunslinger himself who sees him as the creator. And, in typical King fashion, many of the books suffer from word bloat, expanding to more than double the size they’d really need to be.

The Ending

Long before the end of the series, you know that the final adversary will be the Crimson King. He’s one of King’s favorite villains, having made a major appearance in some of his other books, including an on-screen role in Insomnia. But, as time goes on, you wonder how the heck Roland the gunslinger and his group of other gunslingers will ever be able to defeat him. The Crimson King is extremely powerful, is actually undead, and is locked outside the Dark Tower that has been Roland’s obsession for most of his life. He wants Roland’s guns as a sort of talisman, but we’re told there’s no way to kill the Crimson King, so it seems like Roland’s just walking into his hands.

And then, a couple hundred pages before the end, Roland finds a note from Stephen King referring to a “deus ex machina”. This does not bode well. And sure enough, Roland’s group gets a new member, a mute artist. His sketches are so lifelike that you can hardly believe they’re not real, and if he draws something that he sees in real life, and then erases it, the real thing disappears too. Cue magical unforeseen ability added slapdash at the last minute. You may as well call the guy “Patch” because he exists solely to patch the gaping hole in Stephen King’s plotline. And apparently he realized it himself, hence his note to Roland warning him of it. Yup, sure enough, the artist is the one to kill the Crimson King by drawing a picture of him. Just drawing him in pencil doesn’t work this time though. He has to use blood for the eyes, which doesn’t erase, so the Crimson King is still around, he’s just a bodiless presence.

And as if that lame final conflict weren’t enough, when Roland finally enters the Dark Tower, he finds it in memorabilia of his own life, and then suddenly he finds his life rewound to a battle he fought decades ago when he lost his battle horn which the Tower has told him is a powerful talisman.ÂÂ And so he begins his quest all over again.

In a way this makes sense. The series began with Roland pursuing his quest alone, and so it’s somewhat fitting for his quest to continue alone at the end. But this is little better than the cliched and annoying “it was all a dream” ending. In the end, none of it really happened, so I’ve just wasted my time reading seven friggin books that the author has just unwritten. Roland has lived for his quest for so long that he could never be happy without his quest, but I just figured that would mean he would die at the end, or would find a new completely different quest, not just take up his whole same quest all over again.

I’m much happier with this one if I just pretend that the pages are blank as Roland approaches the Tower.

2. Dreamcatcher(the movie)

directed by Lawrence Kasdan, based on book by Stephen King

Premise

Childhood friends on a hunting trip (in Maine) fight off an invasion of alien shit weasels lead by a bodysnatcher.

Overall

Yup, another Stephen King, but this time, the movie adaptation of his book. The book adaptation was quite nice, and much of the movie was done very well also. There were some really great actors, including Morgan Freeman and Jason Lee in one of my favorite of his roles as Beaver. But the movie made some major changes from the book. The sort of changes that, if you’ve also read the book, make you wonder what the holy hell they must have been thinking to have done it. It’s still worth seeing, because many of the really chilling visuals are well adapted, and even some of the new stuff is cool. But the major changes kept the movie adaptation from being really great.

The Ending

The most important character in the story is Duddits, a friend these four guys made in childhood, a Down’s Syndrome kid who was more than he appeared. A recurring theme common in many of King’s books is that people with conditions that would often be called mental disabilities turn out to be special in some extraordinary way, often exhibiting psychic powers. In both the book and the movie, Duddits’s powers are somewhat contagious, gifting his friends with extra abilities, like psychic powers and the ability to find things lost. In both cases, he is integral to both the premise and the resolution of the movie, being the one who is most able to stand against Mr. Gray the body snatching alien.

In the book, Duddit’s contribution to the climax is a very powerful scene. In the movie, well, Duddits turns out to be shapeshifting alien fighting for the side of good, who comes and has a battle to the death with the evil Mr. Gray. I am not making this up.

3. Mulholland Drive

directed by David Lynch

Premise

Er… um… well, if you figure out what this movie is about, let me know.

Overall

I really liked Twin Peaks TV show, created by David Lynch, so I wanted to watch this one all the way through, to give him the benefit of the doubt. Halfway through the movie, two of the actresses swap roles for no apparent reason, and there’s a gremlin living behind a convenience store. Throughout the whole movie, it always seemed like I was just missing one revelation that would make all the previous nonsense come together in some meaningful way.

The Ending

Like I said, throughout the whole movie, I always felt like I was just on the verge of understanding what the hell was happening. The characters were interesting, despite their unexplained role swap. The gremlin behind the convenience store and all that weird stuff was interesting, but all sort of absurd and random, but not in a way that quite managed to make sense even in an absurdist light.

So I’m watching, watching, hoping that at the very end, some light will be shed upon the random hodgepodge that this movie has built up for itself. And what do I get? Definitely not what I was hoping for. Earlier in the movie, there had been a couple tourists, older, overweight folks in gaudy clothes. Well, these same people reappear as semitransparent specters, maybe 4 inches tall, creeping under someone’s bedroom door, giggling gleefully, and advance on the bed. And then (if I remember correctly) you get one more shot of the gremlin behind the convenience store. If anyone has any idea what was supposed to have happened, please do let me know.

4. Stardust (the novel)

written by Neil Gaiman

Premise

Lovestruck boy saves heavenly body from cannibal witch.

Overall

I really like Neil Gaiman’s writing, and in particular I really like this story, but this is one of a rare case when I think a movie adaptation of a book did better than the book itself. I’m a sucker for a good quest, and Tristran’s quest to find the fallen star to give to the girl he thinks he loves is a great one. I love the interaction between the very human star (named Yvaine) and the young Tristran. I love the comedy, including that provided by Robert Deniro as the cross-dressing Captain Shakespeare. Michelle Pfeiffer did a great job playing the witch.

Much of the book and the movie were similar, but the ending is drastically different, and the movie ending was much improved by the movie adaptation.

The Ending

Stardust is one of the few cases I’ve ever seen where I enjoyed a movie adaptation of a book more than the book itself. The most major villain in both stories is the witch who intends to eat the heart of the human-formed star to regain her youth and magic powers. She is responsible for setting up many of the obstacles in the story, and she is bad ass.

In the movie, they end up having a huge fight with the witch, and she pits her magic against their heroism. Most memorable of this is that she uses a voodoo doll in water to kill one of the major characters, and then uses the doll to reanimate his body. It’s a great effect, with the ghost of the dead man looking on from the side as his sopping wet body performs impossible moves without even looking at what it’s doing, its head dangling limply, obviously more pulled along by his sword hand than in control of it. This is an epic fight scene, and they’re finally only able to defeat the witch when Yvaine shows her unforeseen ability to shine so brightly that the witch burns right up. Okay, that last bit is a bit cheesy, but it worked well enough.

In the book, she gives her heart to Tristran (metaphorically), and when she finally comes face to face with the witch at the end, the witch says something along the lines of “You’ve given your heart to another, so it’s not mine to take.” Lame, what a waste of an awesome villain.

5. The Ring

directed by Gore Verbinski

Premise

VHS haunting ghost murders viewers. (This is the real, little known reason that VHS isn’t popular anymore)

Overall

The movie had an interesting, classic horror style. There are a lot of cool images here, especially in the ghost’s final manifestation. The eventual reveal of what the image of the ring represents is a cool one. Unfortunately, a lot of the details are inconsistent with each other, especially with a chicken-and-egg relationship of the question of whether the girl was killed because she had terrible powers or if she had terrible powers because of the way she was killed. But overall, most of the movie is a decent horror flick.

The Ending

The main character’s friend is a reporter investigating the phenomenon of the disturbing tape–if anyone watches it, they die a gruesome mysterious death 7 days later. The friend has a child who sees the ill-portented video near the beginning of the movie. So she and her reporter friend set out to solve the mystery of the video to find out where it comes from, what the odd images mean, etc… That search for knowledge is the entire point of the main plot of the movie, and they do eventually find it’s origin and seem to make piece with the ghost that it originates with. And then the ghost shows up and kills the reporter, completely unexpectedly. That part is fine, and is in fact one of the strongest images in the entire movie, with the ghost climbing out of the TV set, her hair completely covering her face. So it turns out that their knowledge didn’t do them a damned bit of good.

What really bugged me, though, is the reveal of what will actually save them. The ghost doesn’t give a damn if you know what the video is about. All she wants is for you to copy the tape and give it to someone else. If you do this, then you will not die. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s the subject of about a million email chain letters “send this on or you will die/have bad luck/lose money”. Why couldn’t they have just left that list bit off and quite while they were ahead?

6. It (the novel)

written by Stephen King

Premise

Childhood friends (from Maine) reunite (in Maine) to kill a shapeshifting clown.

Overall

Yup, a third King entry. I haven’t actually seen the movie version of this, but the book version I quite enjoyed. It is very long, one of his longest, topping over 1000 pages. It was one of the very first King books I ever read, back in junior high, lots of really scary moments, and the action is pretty well interspersed throughout. The story flashes betweenthe past, when a group of 6 friends (5 boys, 1 girl) first came across this shapeshifting boogey monster type creature who’s been causing a series of deaths across the city of Derry, and the present decades later, where they have gathered again to drive the monster back once again. I’d recommend the book if you feel like a long read.

The Ending

The very very ending of the book with the confrontation with It beneath Derry is actually fine, told in parallel with the characters as adults and children. It’s the part that comes a little while earlier that really bugs me. When they are children, as they’re crawling through the tunnels, headed for their destination, they’re all losing heart in the face of the terrors ahead of them, and they’re just about ready to turn around. They stop, and are going to completely give up, but they find a way to get up the guts to go on. How? Well, all 5 of the pre-teen boys have sex with the girl. And after they all boink her, they magically find the will to go on Um…. where the heck did that come from? The scene was gratuitous, awkward, weird, and just plain added nothing to the story. Each of the characters had a role to play in the story, a reason why they were chosen by fate to face up against the evil monster, and with this turn of events it seems that her sole purpose in the group was to be their pre-teen sex object.

7. Under the Dome

written by Stephen King

Premise

A town (in Maine) is trapped inside a giant snow globe.

Overall

I reviewed this one last month, so I won’t go into too many details. Overall, good story, though quite long, interesting situation, good characters.

The Ending

This is reiterating a bit from the review. The people under the Dome are trapped in there for weeks. Most of the time people are dealing with each other, interpersonal problems, and only a couple people bother trying to figure out how to get out from under the Dome. Finally a few weeks later, a few people get the idea to find the source of the impenetrable shield surrounding their town. Finally they find it, a small device up on the highest hill in town. They try to move it, but it won’t budge, but touching it gives them a telepathic connection with strange lifeforms and they come to the conclusion that they aliens are children who have put the device there as a sort of game. The people try to throw a lead shield on it to suppress it’s signal, but the lead melts. And then they give up until the end of the book. What a bunch of losers to give up so easily? Try blasting it with dynamite. Try pouring acid on it. Try hitting it with a sledgehammer. Trying putting a lead dome around it, but at a distance so it is not touching the device.

But no, these people just decide there’s nothing they can do and go back to dealing with the interpersonal problems. A few weeks later, the proverbial poo hits the fan when the town’s meth lab, surrounded by a stockpile of most of the town’s propane, explodes, filling the down with a fiery inferno, Killing all but 30 people and 2 dogs. Fortunately the fire goes out on its own. Unfortunately, this is because there’s so little oxygen left to burn. On the outside the military has set up huge industrial fans, which provide enough force to push a bit of fresh air through the Dome so the survivors are those who can make it to that part of the Dome before they suffocate.

For the next couple chapters, they just sit in that area, gasping for breath, as they die one by one. Finally someone comes up with the idea to go back to the device, connect with the aliens and simply beg for their lives. And it works, solving everyone’s problems. So… I bet they were kicking themselves for not having tried that earlier, they could’ve saved many thousands of lives, instead of just a couple dozens. Seriously, people!

8. Evolution

directed by Ivan Reitman

Premise

Hyper-evolution! Take that, Intelligent Design!

Overall

This was a really cool idea, with a “hive” of aliens that are able to evolve amazingly quickly from onehostile form to another, from microorganisms, to giant flesh burrowing mosquitoes, and on. There’s a lot of good comedy here too, including great lines an ex-researcher science teacher played by David Duchovny, and some good ones from MadTV alumnus Orlando Jones. Sure, the premise of the movie isn’t really plausible, including a pretty shaky understanding of the actual scientific principle of evolution, but if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief the idea is really fun, and the special effects are generally well done.

The Ending

As the movie goes on, the alien lifeforms just get worse and worse, eventually evolving into ape-like analogs who can use tools, but they go even further, merging into one gigantic amoeba like blob which begins to crawl across the countryside absorbing everything. So our heroes, David Duchovny and his students are in a classroom trying to think of some way to stop the aliens. Together they come up with an absolutely ludicrous idea, which of course turns out to be the key. They bring out a periodic table, and point out that humans are carbon-based (point to the “C”), and that our poison is Arsenic (point to the “As”, down 2 and right 1). The aliens are nitrogen based (point to the “N”), so therefore their poison must be selenium (point to the “Se”). One of the students remembers that Selenium is the active ingredient in Head and Shoulders dandruff shampoo. So they manage to fill an entire fire truck with Head and Shoulders, and blast it up the bunghole of the big blobby thing, finally killing it.

There are so many things wrong with this:
-Humans don’t have just one poison. Arsenic is one that’s historically popular, but lead is poisonous to us, as is mercury. There are lots of elements that will easily kill us if ingested, and that’s not even taking into account compounds made of these elements.
-While the periodic table is a handy visualization, and separates out sections for metals, and nonmetals, and other handy separations, an arbitrary patterned jump is not meaningful.
-I really doubt a fire truck could pump shampoo well(though I think I could forgive this for the sake of humor if they’d given at least a show of making the rest make sense).

9. 9

directed by Shane Acker (not to be confused with Nine, a completely unrelated movie which also came out in the same year)

Premise

Rag dolls vs. war machines.

Overall

I really enjoyed this movie. Lots of good voice acting, including Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, and a rare appearance by the ever-strange Crispin Glover.

This movie has a lot of great things going for it. Early in the movie, they accidentally awaken a sentient war machine by snapping a device to it. These little rag dolls are up against mechanical minions slapped together by the war machine that has apparently killed all of humanity. This was a great one to see in theaters because the sheer scale of the killing machines is terrifying, and even more so if it’s on the big screen so you feel no bigger than the rag dolls. The creature design is especially fantastic: the war machine has limited materials, so it cobbles together its minions from spare parts lying around, each one uber creepy and almost familiar in its mimicry of real animals, yet utterly bizarre.

One of the criticisms oft leveled against the movie is that the characters are one-dimensional. But that’s really a criticism for this particular movie, because the reason for that simplicity of personality is revealed: all 9 rag dolls have minds which are merely fragments of a single human. So each of them is a personality trait more than a personality of itself.

The Ending

As the movie goes on, the war machine catches the dolls one by one and in a flash of light sucks their life away with the small device attached near the beginning, and you see an internal view of them on the war machine’s viewscreen, sort of like a soul. 6 (the eccentric striped doll played by the awesome Crispin Glover) stops them from killing the machine when they have an opportunity, which to me seemed like a major plot point. He says that to destroy the machine would not solve their problems. His protests are enough that the war machine sucks out his soul in the meantime. He says that their friends are still alive inside the machine and destroying it would destroy them too.

So they keep running, and it picks off more and more of them. The way I interpreted this as time went on was that they should surrender and allow the machine to suck all of their souls away so that all 9 of them are all inside the machine. Remember, they are 9 fragments of one human mind, so if you recombine them inside the mind of the machine, maybe the human can take back over.

So how do they resolve it? Well, they grab the device off of the machine and suck the souls back out. This kills the war machine. Somehow they fiddle with the device, and it releases all the captive souls, and it seeds the clouds (or something) and rain begins to fall. Raindrops land on the camera and in the magnification, you can see microorganisms crawling around in them. It’s never explained why the release of a handful of rag doll souls would make it rain, or why it would return life to the planet. Unexplained, nonsensical, and completely against the most obvious conclusion that they all should have joined inside the machine to reunite.

10. The Faculty

directed by Robert Rodriguez

Premise

Misfit students who attack their teachers avoid life in prison by saying that it was self defense against alien bodysnatchers.

Overall

I’m not claiming that this is high quality cinema, nor that it’s even a particularly great example of an alien horror movie. But it’s a decent specimen of an alien horror movie, and you’ll probably enjoy it if you don’t go in with too many expectations. It was an early movie in several stars careers, most notably Josh Hartnett and Ali Larter, and had plenty of other stars like Bebe Neuworth (Lilith on Frasier), Robert Patrick (T-1000 in Terminator 2), and Elijah Wood.

Bodysnatchers take over the teachers in this school, and then take the popular kids one by one. The last ones left as regular humans are the misfits, the drug dealers, the losers, the new kids, and they’re the ones who end up having to fight the aliens and try to save the world. Yeah, the premise is a bit cheesy, and a bit wish fulfillment as well, but really isn’t a bad setup for a movie.

The Ending

During the movie, they discover all these little ear-worm aliens that are taking over everyone’s bodies. They hypothesize, based on movies that they’ve seen, that there must be a queen, and that killing the queen will kill the rest of them. And, of course, this turns out to be oh so conveniently true. But why would this be true? When I think “queen” I generally think of ants or bees, who have the one egg-laying huge insect who creates all the offspring. But killing her doesn’t kill the rest of them. They will raise a new queen from one of the eggs if they need to. And even if the hive didn’t survive, they still wouldn’t die instantly. It just bugs me when characters come to such a ridiculous conclusion based on no information whatsoever, and it turns out to be true for the sake of plot convenience.

Another Perspective on How to Write a Rejection Slip

written by David Steffen

Two weeks ago we posted the article How to Write a Rejection Slip by Christopher Miller, which sparked quite a bit of interesting discussions here, on Facebook, and on blog sites that linked to us. Some agreed, some didn’t, and a good time was had by all talking about what we really like or don’t like to see in a rejection slip.

As a counterpoint to Christopher’s list, I thought I’d post a list of my own. My list is quite different from Christopher’s, though there is some overlap. If anyone reading this has a different list, feel free to post it in the comments, or if you have a list on your blog to post a link to the list.

1. Write personal rejections, if possible.

Of the 289 rejections I’ve received to date, less than a third have been personalized. I always appreciate a personal response. It’s just nice to know sometimes that somebody actually bothered to read my story, and didn’t reject it out of hand because of my lack of Name Fame. Some markets seem to publish only the relatively famous, even when those stories are quite low quality (in my opinion) so it’s hard not to surmise that some of them just disregard newcomers completely.

Even if you don’t have time to write a personal rejection for every submission, there are ways to make your form letters more informative. For example:

-Use a tiered form letter system, which has different wording for different levels of success. Fantasy & Science Fiction uses this to great success. “Didn’t grab my interest” means that the slush reader didn’t finish reading it–you may want to work on the beginning to make it more compelling. “Didn’t quite work for me” means that they finished reading, but in the end it just wasn’t good enough for them. “Not right for F&SF” means that they acknowledge that it’s a good story, but it just doesn’t fit their magazine’s style.

-Create a form letter with checkboxes listing reasons why the story was rejected. Dreams of Decadence has a really nice rejection slip of this type. My last rejection from them had two boxes checked: “Plot is weak or nonexistent” and “Please try us again with something else.” In addition, there was a handwritten addition which said “Loved the concept, but moves too slowly.” Since it had a personal note, it’s not really a form rejection anymore, but even without the note, the content of this form letter would have been one of the nicer ones I’ve received. It gave me a specific reason why they didn’t buy it. Not only does this help me consider whether to revise the story, but it helps me focus my future submissions to their magazine. Apparently they prefer a story that develops more quickly than that, and I will now keep that in mind.

2. If possible, give constructive feedback or sincere compliments.

Constructive feedback is always useful. I may not revise a story based on such feedback, but it’s important for me to know why people didn’t like it. Feedback is the most useful if it points to something specific. Examples are:
-The beginning was too slow.
-The protagonist made an important decision that seemed out of character.
-The ending didn’t make sense.

With or without constructive feedback, if you have a sincere compliment about the story do not hesitate to share it with the writer. I’ve had about a 2% acceptance rate for my submissions in the last year, and it tells me that this is higher than average for users who submitted to the same markets as me. It’s not unusual to have hundreds of rejections per acceptance, particularly for those who have yet to establish Name Fame. My first acceptance occurred after 125 uninterrupted rejections. This can take a real toll on the self esteem, making one wonder if you’ll ever make that sale. If even a few of these rejections are complimentary in some specific way, it can really help balance out unending flow of bad news. As an example, that Dreams of Decadence rejection I mentioned in #1 was really quite easy to take. “Loved the concept” says I’m doing something right, and that really means something

3. Don’t be an ass (but don’t lie either)

This should go without saying, but abusive wording gains you nothing. I’ve rarely had this complaint about any editor, but it’s still worth listing. Keep in mind that, even if you didn’t like this story, this writer might send you another story that you do like in the future. This could be a future collaborator. But if you act like an asshole, then they may stop submitting to you. They may encourage other writers not to submit to you, because you’re a jerk. And all because you didn’t take a moment to construct a civil email.

I’m not saying you have to lie. Don’t say “We enjoyed your story” or anything of that variety, unless you mean it.

The closest I’ve come to this complaint is a rejection which said, in its entirety, “Sorry, no.” To me, this was too curt, and in this case I would’ve preferred a stock form letter which used complete sentences and the usual meaningless phrasing.

4. Even if it’s a form letter, at least personalize a couple things.

The first rejection I ever received was a grainy photocopy of an undated standard form letter, “Dear Author”, “Signed, the Editors”. Okay, I know that editorial staff are busy, but that seems a little extreme. I’ve even received some email rejections which don’t even refer to the story name, but just say “Regarding your recent submission.” This email form letter could be populated automatically with a minimum of effort, so this annoys me every time I see it.

First, it should absolutely always have the name of the editor/slushreader who rejected it. Your typical magazine is not going to change editors that often, so it’s a minimal effort to just put their name in the form letter. Omission of this goes beyond mere laziness–it makes me think that the editor is afraid that he will be associated with his own rejections. What are you afraid of? As an editor, you have to make editorial choices, and if you want to be successful you have to stand by those choices. If you’re too scared to put your own name on the rejection, it gives the impression that you’d rather stay anonymous, and makes me wonder if this person has the intestinal fortitude required to be a competent editor. If it was rejected by a slush reader, I really think that the slush readers name should be on it, not the editor. Some magazines put the editors name on it even if it was a slushreader doing the reading, but I prefer to be able to tell if I made it to the real editor or not, and this misleading signature obscures this information from me.

In addition to the rejecter’s name, it’s really nice if it can have the following:
-Date
-Name of Author
-Name of Story

This really doesn’t take much effort, and in the case of email rejections, most of it can be completely automated, so there’s really no excuse. If the editorial staff can’t be bothered to refer to me or my story by name, it gives the impression that they’re just apathetic about the writers sending in their life’s work.

5. The longer the wait, the more annoying a form letter is.

I recently received a form rejection for a short story after nine months of waiting–that is the pinnacle of lameness. It’s bad enough that the amount of time was equivalent to the gestation period of a human fetus, they couldn’t even bother taking five minutes to write something about the story. On the other hand, I usually get form rejections from Clarkesworld, but they’ve also never taken longer than three days to send me a rejection, so I have no complaints about receiving a form rejection from them.

As a rule of thumb, I’d say that any market that takes more than 3 months to respond should be sending 100% personal responses.

6. Don’t say “Keep writing!”

Never. Just don’t do it. It will always come off as condescending. We appreciate the attempted encouragement, but it comes off as condescending every time. Whenever I read this, I picture a parent picking up their kid after his peewee team loses the big game. “Chin up, sport. You did your best and that’s all that counts. I know what will cheer you up! Consolation cake!” For those who would stop writing because of a single rejection, well, two words isn’t going to change their course. For those who wouldn’t stop writing because of that, it gets really annoying to read this over and over.

7. Don’t write an all-purpose form letter that says “we enjoyed it”

I love to see this sentiment expressed in a personal rejection. In a form letter it is CLEARLY insincere because it’s a friggin’ form letter!

8. Needlessly obtuse sentence structure

These people are supposed to be editors, right? So I’d like to think that they can put words in some kind of coherent and parsable order. Adding more words doesn’t help unless the words add meaning. Things like: “We regret to have to inform you that we are declining acceptance at this time.”
-The regret is clearly insincere, because it’s a form letter that they send to everyone.
-According to their wording, they don’t regret rejecting you. They don’t regret informing you of your rejection. But they DO regret the fact that they feel obligated to inform you of your rejection.
-“Declining acceptance”? Who the hell wrote that? That rings of Captain Barbossa’s “I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request” except this is apparently NOT trying to be funny.

9. Do NOT spam those who submit to you

Pedestal Magazine, this means you. Whenever I submit a story through Pedestal’s submissions form, about a minute later I get an email welcoming me to their mailing list, and thanking me for signing up for it. There’s no way to uncheck a box that will opt out of this form letter when you submit. And thereafter I get periodic emails from John Amen (who I don’t really care about) telling me of his upcoming book signings (in states I’ve never visited) and telling me about upcoming books (that I will not be buying). Luckily, I can just add this to my “spam” list–the story rejection comes from a different address than the spam. But even so, not spamming your submitters should be common sense.

MiniCon Report (and my first editor pitch)

I’ve been meaning to make it to a science fiction convention for quite a while now. Even before I started writing they sounded like fun, lots of people with similar tastes all getting together and hanging out, swapping book recommendations, arguing about which authors write better books and why, and so on. But now that I’m writing, I figured I should check out the con scene from the fan side before people start knowing who I am.

For some reason all the cons in the Twin Cities seem to occur over holiday weekends, so for the last few years I’ve been out of town visiting family and unable to attend. But this year, I learned early that Brandon Sanderson was the writer guest of honor. So I registered early and decided that this time I would go.

I asked a few people if they’d want to go with me, but no one took me up on it, so I ended up going solo. Which was probably for the best, because if I’d been there with someone I probably would’ve just used them as an excuse to not meet anyone. So to avoid just sitting by myself the whole time I struck up conversations with a few strangers, met a few writers I’ll try swapping story critiques with, and just got a chance to talk to people about all kinds of things.

I missed the opening ceremonies, including the keynote speech by Brandon Sanderson because we’d bought hockey tickets for that night long before I registered for MiniCon. So I didn’t get to MiniCon until Saturday, with the meetup of the local speculative fiction writers group Minnspec. That was nice to meet a few of the members. I’ve been meaning to get involved with them for quite a while but I’ve just never gotten around to it. I mostly stuck to the panels during the day, not the bars after or the musical guests or anything like that. I’ve been so busy with schoolwork lately that I haven’t been able to spend as much time with Heather as I’d like, and since I was lucky enough to get a homework free weekend in the middle of the semester I wanted to make sure I didn’t neglect her the whole weekend.

For those of you who are used to the big mega-size cons, this is many orders of magnitude different, which is both good and bad. Bad because, of course, there are less guests, less people. But good because it’s so much more personal. At the big cons, if there’s a big guest, you could be one of thousands of people waiting around for a chance to get a glimpse, let alone any actual personal contact. But here, there just a few guests, and about four parallel programming tracks in four rooms. Even the guests of honor are extremely accessible. Most of the panels had a few dozen attendants, and a handful would hang around to talk to the folks presenting.

After the MinnSpec panel was an Editors’ panel with Moshe Feder (Brandon’s editor), Ben Bova (who should need no introduction), Eric Heidemen (editor of Tales of the Unanticipated), and Michael Merriam (slush reader for Fantasy Magazine). That was really cool, especially seeing Ben Bova was particularly cool. All four of them had a good sense of humor and had a lot of good interplay.

That afternoon I stopped at a Dan Dos Santos art exhibition. He showed a sped up video of him painting the cover art for Warbreaker, 70 hours compressed to 10 minutes or so. That was really cool to see it start at the vaguest shapes and down to finer and finer details, with layers of colors that look strange at first but blend into the vivid colors and textures of the final image. After that, he did a quick portrait of Brandon while everybody watched and while the fans could watch both of them. That took about a half hour and was really neat to watch.

Most of the rest of the programming I went to was Brandon Sanderson programming. He gave some interesting advice, told some funny stories, and was just generally good to listen to, including one panel dedicated just to telling the story of how he got the Wheel of Time gig.

But the highlight of the con, for me, was The Pitch. Anyone could volunteer to throw a three-minute novel pitch, for a novel that’s complete or incomplete, and give it front of Moshe Feder and Brandon Sanderson. I only heard about it a few hours ahead of time, but I decided that the opportunity was too good to pass out. So between the panels I wrote out a quick outline to help me when I was on the spot.

We volunteers raised our hands and Brandon picked one of us at random to go first. That random person happened to be me, so I got to go up and throw out my pitch before seeing what anyone else’s pitch sounded like or seeing how kind or cruel Moshe or Brandon were. So I gave my three minute pitch, terrifying, a bit awkward, but I made it through the whole thing with only a few ums and ahs. I didn’t have time to get out the whole plot, but I got about halfway through to a good stopping point. My characters, uh, need a little work, so I concentrated mostly on the plot.

Both Moshe and Brandon were simultaneously nice and honest. Both for my pitch and everyone else’s they gave constructive criticism and you got a pretty good idea of their level of interest in the story. Both of them had their points about my story, and they were mostly on target. I didn’t describe my characters much, which is an area that I’d had trouble with in the manuscript itself as well (it’s been quite a while since I worked on it, it could use some polish in that area). Brandon thought one part of the plot was too much of an idiot plot–that one I didn’t agree with, but I can see how he would’ve thought that from the short pitch. They also pointed something out which I hadn’t thought of at all–my beginning is very much a thriller beginning, an ordinary guy with his life thrown into sudden and immediate danger, and putting him on the run. But, despite the things they pointed out as needing improvement, Moshe said he’d be interested in seeing the manuscript. I’ve been concentrating on short stories for quite a while but it seems this would be a good time to reawaken the novel writer in me.

And after the feedback, Moshe gave me a Jelly Rat (like a Swedish Fish, but with a wormtail), which was a nice touch.

Some of the pitches were smoother than others, but Moshe and Brandon found something to compliment and something suggest an improvement for each one. I’ll list some of the more prevailing threads here, for anyone who might learn from it:

1. Don’t be too vague. Editors don’t care about spoilers when they’re hearing a pitch. One of the writers was afraid of giving away details that would be stolen, but it left the pitch so vague that it meant nothing. Sentences like “and they did something” means that you should probably either leave that out entirely or flesh it out to something more specific.

2. Tell something about the characters. Most everyone can come up with an SF idea, and there’s no doubt that SF ideas are important, but there need to be characters that have the problems, that drive the story, and it’s the interactions between the characters and the idea that make the story really unique.

3. Try to include as many of the relevant details as possible. Granted this is really difficult when you have such a limited time limit, especially when it was an impromptu pitch in the first place. For instance, if you explain the climax of the story, and it depends on some major plot point that happens earlier, you’ll want to make sure you mentioned that plot point.

So that was my first editor pitch. I thought it went well, and I’m looking forward to sending something to Moshe a manuscript as soon as I can.

Anyway, back to the con. Then, Sunday was mostly centered around doing the autograph fanboy thing. I bought a copy of Warbreaker, and got it autographed by Brandon(who wrote it), Dan (who did the fantastic cover art), and Moshe (who edited it). On top of that, I bought a print of a really great piece of art by Dan, a portrait of Moiraine Damodred (from the Wheel of Time series). I didn’t intend to buy any art, but it was just so beautiful I couldn’t possibly turn it down. I need to get a really nice frame for it and hang it in my office over my desk.

I’ll definitely be going again next year.

Fun With Flash Fiction!

Hi everyone! I have a writing exercise I’m going to try out. I’m curious to see how it works, and I’ll need your help to do it. Don’t worry, no heavy lifting or paperwork required. All I need from each and every one of you is a trigger. Now you’re probably wondering what the heck I’m going on about. Well, a trigger, in this context, is a word or phrase that is used to try to create a story from. Once I have a trigger, I’ll try to use that to root a story idea in it, and will let the story grow from there. The story does not have to contain the word, nor does the connection to the word have to be obvious. The goal is get the creative flow going and end up with something in the end. So what I need from you are the trigger words. You can leave a comment here. I intend to use each and every one of them to create a story–the time frame for doing this is uncertain since I’m not sure how big of a response to expect from this, and I do have other writing projects as well as Real Life going on in parallel. So please, drop a message here with a trigger. Please keep it clean to some extent.

Where did the idea for this come to mind? Two places:
1. I first came across this idea at Liberty Hall Writer’s Forum, where they hold a weekly flash fiction challenge. Once you log in to see the trigger, you have just 90 minutes to write a complete story and submit it so you can view others’ stories and vote on your favorite. It’s a great way to get a story going when you’re having trouble getting the start. I encourage you to stop by and give it a try.

2. I lovingly stole the idea for taking triggers from a group of friends from an interview with writer Greg Van Eekhout who has tried this before. It sounded like fun, so here goes. Thanks Greg!

Technology and Writing

Technology is constantly changing the way we do so many things, and writing is no exception. How exactly? I’ve broken down the answer to that question into a set of categories. Keep in mind that all of this is through my own perspective on writing, which has been primarily speculative fiction short stories.

Is there anything I’ve left out, related to any sort of writing? Leave a comment!

1. Revising/writing

a. Spell Check-Many would be lost without spell check. Many programs, including Microsoft Word, even do a spell check as you type, and immediately mark an incorrectly spelled word the moment you type it. The spell check program can suggest alternative spellings, provide dictionary look-up. Still, spell checks could be improved–if the program could recognize a name through context this would prevent a lot of false alarms. Word also comes with a grammar check, but that is less useful because its grasp of grammar rules is shaky at best.

b. Revise and print-You decided you want to add a new paragraph on page one of a five hundred page manuscript? Or you discovered that all of your pages need a 1.5 inch margin instead of 1 inch? No problem! All you need to do is open up the document in your word processor, make your changes, and it’s ready to print. If you wanted to do this with a typewritten manuscript, it would not be fun at all.

2. Backing up your work

Imagine that, after putting weeks, months, or years of work into creating a masterpiece of prose, you suddenly lose your only copy of your manuscript. You remember the major plot points, but you’ve lost all the little details, and all the beautiful sentence-level work. It’s a terrible thought! Well, these days, there’s no reason to lose all your work if you just take a little time to prepare. Email is a convenient way to back your documents up. Many email services provide large storage banks for each account. I have a Gmail account that I started for free that makes a great aid to backing up documents. While I’m working on a new document, I email myself every couple of days. If I ever lost my other copies, all I would need to do is dig up the saved email. In addition to that, if someone plagiarized your work in the future, the timestamp on the email could help prove that you had a work in progress of the story long before it was in print. In addition to email, it’s always a good idea to back up a file in several places, each at different physical locations (so that a disaster like a fire doesn’t destroy years and years of hard work).

There are even programs designed specifically to help you keep your stuff backed up. Anthony recommend Carbonite.

3. Learning the craft

a. Interaction with pro authors-When I was younger, professional writers seemed to be a race of distant and otherworldly beings that I could never hope to interact with, lest my head explode (like when humans hear the voice of God in some belief sets). But now that illusion has been mostly dispelled. Don’t get me wrong, I still admire my favorite writers greatly for the amazing worlds they’re able to pull seemingly out of nowhere, but it turns out that quite a lot of them are quite nice people, and I’m even pretty sure that some of them are at least mostly human. Lots of them have blogs where they freely give writing advice to anyone who’s interested in listening. David Farland, for instance, has an email blog called Kick in the Pants–you can sign up for it at his website. Dean Wesley Smith is another favorite, providing great advice on his blog, including ideas for self-motivation like The Race. I’ve even added quite a few of my favorite authors as friends on Facebook–I enjoy hearing their writing updates and hear when they’re coming through my area for book signings.

No single writing method works for everyone, so if David Farland’s advice doesn’t work for you, don’t be discouraged. Just keep trying different methods until you find something that really clicks. Check out the sites of a few different authors. At the very least, their perspectives are entertaining. And if you have any questions, drop a comment to one of them. Keep in mind that they’re busy, but it’s not at all rare for them to take some time to reply to questions or comments.

b. Peer critique forums-Once I decided to start writing I spent more than a year writing a novel, mostly in isolation. I had just a few people who were willing to give me feedback on my stories, but these people tended to be inclined to tell me that they really liked the story, but not tell me much else. This was good for my ego, but not so useful to improve my writing skills. After that year, I decided to start writing short stories, and while doing market research I came across Baen’s Bar, a peer critique forum that doubled as a submission vehicle for Jim Baen’s Universe. You can post a story to their forum, and it is available immediately for feedback from others registered on the forum. Staff members of JBU often gave their comments, as well as other aspiring writers. Not only can you get feedback on your own work, many of whom are very experienced and have a good eye for picking out what’s missing in a story, but you can critique the writing of others. Of all the ways to improve your own writing, critiquing others is the best way, in my opinion. It allows you examine the stories of other aspiring writers and examine them with a cold eye without any emotional attachment to the story. You can decide what you like and what you don’t, and the real trick is to learn how to apply this to your own writing.

Jim Baen’s Universe will be closed as of mid-2010. There are no official plans to close Baen’s Bar critique forum, and the newsgroup it exists on will probably still need to be maintained for Baen’s Books and the Grantville Gazette magazine, so i hope the venue is around for a good long time.

c. Easy sharing-If you want to share a copy of a story with a friend, all you have to do is drop them an email. It’s free, and it’s quick, and a great way to share your work for feedback or just for fun.

d. Autocrit-Autocrit is a subscription-based service which provides automated tools to help watch for trouble spots in your manuscripts. It can look for potential flaws such as overused words and phrases, cliches, and overused dialogue tags. No tool is the end-all be-all of revising your manuscript, but this tool in combination with other techniques and tools can make a big difference.

4. Research

The effect of the Internet on research is obvious. Anyone with Internet access has nearly endless banks of information at their disposal, but one must always keep the source in mind. Wikipedia, for instance, is good for finding quick, interesting information, but because it is created by users, information provided there may not be correct. If a writer decides to write a story about doppelgangers, a quick Google search can provide a plethora of information in a fraction of a second.

5. Market info

1. Sites like Ralan provide submission information for a wide variety of publications.Â

2. Most markets have submisions page which describes exactly what they’re looking for, including any special formatting they require, required length, and preferred themes. Be sure to check out this page each time you send out a story to that market. You never know when some of their requirements will change. Many markets close to submissions from time to time, also, and it’s best to check here to be sure the market is still open as well.

6. Electronic submission/staff interaction

a. Save money-It costs nothing to send an email. That’s a major perk! Mailed submissions usually cost something like 2 dollars domestic within the US, including the SASE, and that’s not including the envelopes or the printing costs. Email submissions cost nothing. When you’re just getting started, those postage costs add up fast!

b. Quick interaction-An electronic submission arrives nearly instantly, ready for perusal by the magazine’s staff. My record fastest response was only 47 minutes (from Fantasy Magazine). That one was an outlier, but a few magazines consistently respond within 24 hours such as Fantasy, Clarkesworld, and Podcastle.

c. Geographically separated staff-A magazine’s staff members no longer have to be located anywhere near each other. In many cases, staff members may have never met in person, but members can interact easily with technology like email and online forums. This makes it much easier to find staff members, if you have the entire net-connected world to filter for candidates.

d. Competition fiercer every day! A downside to the recent ease of submission is that when submissions are both free and easy, more and more people will try it, which means more competition!

7. New publishing mediums

Printed words (either in magazine or book form) are no longer the only way to publish fiction. In fact, print may be the hardest one to maintain profitability with, and is probably the hardest method to start a new magazine with. Even a few years ago, print publications were generally considered to be more prestigious, but minds are opening a little bit more every year. SFWA recognizes professional markets based on pay and the circulation level, regardless of the medium.

Both of my sales to date have been to non-traditional publishing formats.

a. HTML-text format on a website. This can be provided for free (like Fantasy Magazine or Strange Horizons) or on a fee-based system (like Intergalactic Medicine Show or Jim Baen’s Universe).

b. Podcast-I’ve recently discovered audio fiction and I honestly don’t know how I’ve done without it. I can load up many stories on my iPod and I listen to them every day on my commute. Now I look forward to driving to see what the next story is! My first fiction sale was to Pseudopod, so I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for podcasts. And, even better, audio rights and text rights often do not overlap, so there is a large potential for resales for audio markets, as they are providing a substantially different product.

c. Print on Demand-Even just a few years ago, POD wasn’t really a viable option. Nowadays, if you have a good idea for a book or an anthology, you can publish it through POD and if you can find the audience for it, you can really do well. POD is not as risky as doing a huge preprinted print run (the traditional method), because you only print copies of the book that you have already sold. This means that once you’ve covered your artist/design and other upfront costs, each sale holds a share of profit. This is particularly appealing if the level of interest is uncertain or expected to be low.

Northern Frights Press was the publisher for my second sale. This was NFP’s very first anthology, provided via POD. Despite it being POD the printing is of a high quality that you could find in any bookstore, and it’s available to order from Amazon just like any other book. I’ve been very impressed with POD so far.

d. E-books-E-readers like Kindle are just starting to gain more widespread popularity. For a small fee, you can download books right onto the e-reader. With this technology you can grab new books instantly for less than what you would pay at the store, and you can carry your whole library with you wherever you go. I’m not sure that they will ever replace real books entirely–there’s just something I love about holding a physical book in my hand, the smell of the pages, the feel of the binding–but there are a lot of advantages to e-readers.

8. Social networking

In decades past, writing was generally considered to be a pretty lonely profession. Long hours alone with your typewriter were the norm, making a writer feel isolated from the very world she’s trying to write about. But if you’re writing on a net-connected laptop, you no longer need to be isolated. The importance of social connections in writing cannot be understated. There are many forums focused solely on writing, some geared towards particular genres, and they’re a great place to meet fellow aspiring writers. You’re not the only one struggling to be published. Together you can celebrate your successes, console each other for your failures, swap critiques, discuss writing techniques, and maybe just unwind a little bit.

#8 is closely related to #9 and #10. Read on!

9. Self-promotion

This overlaps somewhat with social networking in methods and tools, but the intent is different. Rather than meeting people for the sake of meeting people, this is working to spread your work to as many people as possible. Site like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit work as very powerful promotional tools. With each of these you can share links with huge amounts of people with minimal effort, and they’re all free. Most of the hits for this article were probably generated by these tools. With a little careful promotional work, like book giveaways, traffic can be driven to your site to advertise your writing and help with name recognition.

10. Availability of distractions

The flip side of the coin of all these advantages is that with the whole web at your fingertips, distractions are easy to find. If you’re stuck on a story, staring at the word processing screen, it is far too easy to pop up Facebook to go read your friends’ statuses, to hop on an online forum to discuss True Blood vs. Twilight, or to go read (or write) a blog post about writing. Those things all have their time and place, but if you want to write, make sure you get your writing time in too!