Jibber Jabber - Q1 - 29

What are you talking about, Amanda?

Yeah, wha

What are you talking about, Amanda?

Yeah, wha

Blast it all, something's gone wro

What are you talking about, Amanda?

Yeah, wha

Blast it all, something's gone wro

Aawww fugedaboudit.

....

You guys really want to drag this post out to 200 pages, don't you?

I will refute this baseless accusation by quoting, separately and individually, the relevant 2463 posts from earlier in the thread. Please note my great restraint in not quoting ALL of them, but focusing instead on the relevant ones, especially those involving marshmallows, rejectomancy and variations on "Are we there yet?'

This thread is really starting to drag out and fade away. It's reminding more and more of Larry Niven's "Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", when the last few die-hards all hung around waiting for the good times to finally run out.

But you know what would really liven this place up? More donations!

(And thanks, Kary!)

*sits up from under a mount of paper, pizza boxes plastered with gooey marshmallow, and half empty soda cans*

Where am I? Do we have results yet?

*passes back out*

This thread is really starting to drag out and fade away. It's reminding more and more of Larry Niven's "Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", when the last few die-hards all hung around waiting for the good times to finally run out.

What do you expect us to do, Martin?

Write!?

*sits up from under a mount of paper, pizza boxes plastered with gooey marshmallow, and half empty soda cans*

Where am I? Do we have results yet?

*passes back out*

Pssst... You had results already...

*sits up from under a mount of paper, pizza boxes plastered with gooey marshmallow, and half empty soda cans*

Where am I? Do we have results yet?

*passes back out*

Pssst... You had results already...

Oh, I thought I dreamt that.

This thread is really starting to drag out and fade away. It's reminding more and more of Larry Niven's "Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", when the last few die-hards all hung around waiting for the good times to finally run out.

But you know what would really liven this place up? More donations!

(And thanks, Kary!)

I thought it was the floating party from HHGttG. It's passing the "Good night, good luck, win awards!" part, and well on toward the going mad and zarking off.

This thread is really starting to drag out and fade away. It's reminding more and more of Larry Niven's "Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", when the last few die-hards all hung around waiting for the good times to finally run out.

But you know what would really liven this place up? More donations!

(And thanks, Kary!)

I thought it was the floating party from HHGttG. It's passing the "Good night, good luck, win awards!" part, and well on toward the going mad and zarking off.

Belgium!

Excuse me.

My sister tells me we're only $22 short of our new deadline. If you're still thinking of donating, now is a great time!

Hi, all,

I just got permission from Dave to post my Q1 semi-finalist critique. Here goes!

I quite like the beginning of this as an epic adventure, but in this current iteration it feels too much like the opening of a novel. It feels a bit cluttered, we go from the POV in the opening scene, to scene two with Jerra as POV character in a flashback, to modern day in another location -- all in five pages.

I think that the problem here is that we need to be grounded in a short story and kept, usually, with only one POV. This just felt a bit jarring, moving about so much.

Do keep working on this, and see if you can get it focused down to one central incident that will really hook us into Ailsa as the protagonist. She's the one who seems most interesting to me. I'm almost wondering if this should have started on page five, once we get into her POV."

He's dead on for all three counts. Yes, this is the beginning of a novel. Yes, the omni does jump around a bit. And re: page five - that's where the story used to start before crits asked me for 1) more intro to the world, 2) to work in a certain character a lot sooner, and 3) to give some background on the riders who appear on a hill on page 5. Obeying the crits gave me the three bits prior to page 5 that Dave references.

He's an astute reader, and the crit is both incisive and accurate.

ETA: I think we need a dedicated thread for semi crits so people don't have to dig through pages and pages of Jibber Jabber to find them. I wonder where it should go?

I'm confused.

Weren't you a finalist?

Edit: Oh, right, this is quarter 1.

We do already have a critique thread, though it has KD's name in the title: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1218

Thanks for the critique sharing, Kary!

Keeping my fingers crossed for you for Q2...

Thinking of you folks at Relay for Life!

I'm $17.81 from the next fundraising level. There's still time to donate!

I'll have pictures of the luminaria tomorrow! There's some fear that some luminaria may catch fire (it's a loooong story); but for those of you who donated, send me an email if you'd like your luminaria (assuming it survives the flames).

And you want to know frustrating? THREE STORY IDEAS HAVE COME TO ME! GREAT IDEAS! AND THERE'S NOT A CHANCE I'LL GET TO WORK ON THEM THIS WEEKEND!

Jot them down and go back to them later.

Jot them down and go back to them later.

I installed a voice recorder app on my phone for exactly that reason. The phone battery died 2 hours ago, but not before I got them recorded.

One idea came before I even got here, as I was driving my brother to work. All of a sudden I realized that one of my favorite unfinished stories from last year -- an idea I really loved as an opening, but couldn't figure out how the middle would work out -- would end up looking a lot like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, just in another setting (and not as well done -- he's Neil Freakin' Gaiman, and I'm not). And suddenly I hated the idea, because everything about it was leading inevitably to a Neverwhere clone. But I still loved the ending, where the hapless protagonist gets drawn into the affairs of another world against his will because of where he happened to be at the wrong time.

And then suddenly I thought, "Wait a minute... He gets drawn in because he fails in the Quest that the others are on, without even knowing what he's doing; and eventually, he ends up succeeding in the Quest at the end of the book." (If you've read Neverwhere, you guessed that.) "But what if... What if he succeeds right at the start of the book, without even knowing he was participating? What then?" And that was it. The floodgates opened. My brother was freaked out when I grabbed the phone and started recording notes. My family's not used to seeing me when the Idea Fairy blasts me with her magic wand.

He's dead on for all three counts. Yes, this is the beginning of a novel. Yes, the omni does jump around a bit. And re: page five - that's where the story used to start before crits asked me for 1) more intro to the world, 2) to work in a certain character a lot sooner, and 3) to give some background on the riders who appear on a hill on page 5. Obeying the crits gave me the three bits prior to page 5 that Dave references.

Are you saying that your crits had you add things that DF told you to take out?

Are you saying that your crits had you add things that DF told you to take out?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer goes like this...

The first draft of this story started with three riders on a hill overlooking the millpond below. The story was about 3,300 words. I ran it through Critters, and the most frequent comments were:

1) Need more intro to the world and why all of this matters.
2) A certain character pops up like a jack-in-the-box at the end and should be introduced much sooner - like, at the beginning.
3) Need more background on who these riders are and why they're there.

So I added several scenes, including four pages of front matter. I also took three riders down to two so there were fewer characters to keep track of. The final version came out to 5,000 words.

Without having read the first draft, Dave correctly identified the original start of the story on page five. I'll be taking the novel version of this tale to his Novel Rewriting workshop, so I've had some additional discussions with him about it as the opening of a novel vs. a short story.

As a novel, he wants to see it again before he gives me the final word on cutting some of the front matter. There's yet another new scene in the beginning (of the novel version) that clarifies the omniscient POV as being that of a minor deity, who, in fact, set these events in motion accidentally some thousands of years ago. Dave's first take on this was that it was brilliant, and solves the jumpy POV, but he wants to see it again to make sure.

Interestingly, the rider I cut when I went from three riders to two was a man. One of Dave's other comments was that the story is very female-centric, and while that's not a bad thing in and of itself*, I would draw more readers if I had a strong male character upfront, too.

In the current iteration, the third rider comes in at the 6k mark, right after the end of the story now. We'll see if this satisfies Dave, or if he wants him back right from the opening.

Dave's comments have been so spot on that it's uncanny. It's like he has this prescient ability to see the bones of the first draft under the existing prose and pick out exactly what I changed.

*people at the March workshop compared me to Marion Zimmer Bradley. I'll take that.

Thanks for the follow up, Kary. Enlightening stuff.

That's great feedback, Kary!

As I recall, I really enjoyed that story and my only real issue was that it felt like the beginning to a novel rather than a short story. I don't recall having an issue with the way you had initially set up the story (with the three riders on the hill). I hope I didn't give you any bad advice with the rest of my critique.

I don't think the advice I got from *anyone* was bad advice. I addressed the issues by adding scenes, so quite likely if I'd threaded the same info through the story bit by bit, it would have been fine.

Other critter comments included a charge of 'head-hopping,' and this drove me nutso with frustration because I was trying to write omni. The frustration paid off in spades, though, because it sent me on a quest to figure out the difference between head-hopping (bad) and omni (good). I received lots of the standard advice (which is *good* advice in most cases) to only switch POVs at scene or chapter breaks, and for heaven's sake, stop doing it in the same sentence.

After lots of back and forth with lots of different people, Sam Hidaka weighed in over at Baen's Bar to say that yes, I was writing omni and doing it well. He went on to say that it seemed to be my natural voice, and that it would serve me well as a storyteller. Sam (I think it was Sam) mentioned Kate Wilhelm as an example of flawless omni, so I went and read me some Kate - and felt completely vindicated when she switched heads in the middle of a sentence.

That said, there is a risk to omni, even if you're doing it right. It's out of vogue. There are editors and houses who won't take omni even if you do it right. There are readers who either no longer understand the technique, or who have been trained to see it as head-hopping and assume it's bad writing.

One of the other pitfalls is that stories where omni is the best POV tend to be stories with an abundance of characters - and that's a tad risky for a WOTF story. If you analyze winning WOTF stories, they tend to be about ONE main character with a limited supporting cast (limited - as in maybe there's only one other person in the story). My semi had an entire flipping village. We met two mystics, three children of note (plus a small crowd of hangers-on), an innkeeper, two parents and a kitten. By contrast, my finalist was a crucible story with a deep first person POV.

Examples from winning stories:

David Carani - The Paradise Aperture - a man and his daughter search for the man's missing wife. Two characters for the vast majority of the story.

William Ledbetter - The Rings of Mars - one man chases another man across the face of a planet.

Gerald Warfield - The Poly Islands - after the death of her grandfather, a girl is stranded alone on a floating island of debris.

Nick T. Chan - The Command for Love - a golem struggles to understand love.

Jordan Ellinger - After the Final Sunset, Again - a phoenix, a woman who burns to death every night, struggles to save her part-human, unborn child from the fatal heat of the nightly burning.

ETA: I'm not saying that something with an ensemble cast can't or won't win, but I think it presents a tougher set of challenges than a story with only one or two main characters.

I agree with you, Kary. I think the larger the cast, the more difficult it is to keep the story tight, which usually results in excess word count. Keeping a short story centered on one to two main characters (and limiting secondary/incidental characters) is just good advice in general, I think (Says the girl whose first finalist contained five+ main characters and over half a dozen separate POVs). So, I bet if you took a larger sampling of published shorts in general (not just WotF stories) you'd see the same thing.

Yup, smaller casts are definitely better in smaller stories. Though I think this can translate into novelette or novella length as well. I can recall several of the longer stories in Asimov's and F&SF that either focused on a single character or on the relationship between two main characters. Readers want to get to know the people who populate a work of fiction, and that's hard to do when there are too many voices vying for attention all at once.

Hey, Evil Martin, where's them pictures we were promised?

Hey, Evil Martin, where's them pictures we were promised?

I'm workin on it, I'm workin' on it! I've had no time after work this week. Tonight I have a slow internet connection. Tomorrow I hope for a faster one.

Take your time. I was only pokin'. (I'd wink at you here, but we all know how you feel about that.)

Wow, you guys are still keeping this alive?! You guys are hard-core!! that's awesome! <img src="