Tag Archives: the writer’s life

When You Know Things Are Going Well

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I was going to entitle this post, “When You Know Things Are Going Good”, but the grammarian in me just couldn’t do it.

The last few months I’ve managed to fit in significantly more writing than I was managing amidst all the new job, new house, new marriage hubbub of autumn. And I’ve been largely pleased with how things have been going. 2012 was a year where, picking up some traction after a fair bit of spinning my wheels during the last few months of 2011, I just started getting meetings with editors, seeing my stuff in print at a variety of places, and started building some good working relationships with people.

Now, in 2013, the lion’s share of my writing is the direct result of connections I made in 2012, and I get to do some cool stuff that I wasn’t doing before, including reaching different audiences, writing in different formats and on different topics, and being in print more frequently as opposed to being almost exclusively online. I know doomsayers have said for years that print is dead, but the fact is, it’s not, and words on paper still mean something to me.

A few years ago, I would have found it hard to believe that I would be able to write about topics I care about — science, the environment, literature — anywhere outside of a personal blog or social network, let alone reach a wide audience, and get paid for it, to boot. But you never know until you try, obviously.

What’s really gratifying, however, is that I’ve been told four separate times from four different editors, independently of each other, that they like my writing and would like to see more of it. A big part of me writing more comes down to simply that.

I think there’s probably a lesson in there about good management. Make your employees feel appreciated and they’ll work harder to justify your high opinion of them. If it works for freelancers, it probably also works for shift supervisors, construction foremen, and school principals. Everyone likes a pat on the back.

(To be fair, my boss at my day job, has also made me feel appreciated. But I think I’ve spent enough years in that profession that I’m less susceptible to ego-stroking on my teaching abilities.)

Anyway, I’m happy on that front. Life in general, well, there have been some sources of stress. But as far as what this blog is about — my writing — I really can’t complain much.

Tuesday Links (01/22/13)

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Now Writers Can Drown Their Sorrows With Their Own Sorrows: Writer’s Tears Irish Whiskey. Learn what tragedy is, in liquid, alcoholic form.

I’m Mentally Ill, I Love Violent Video Games, And They’ve Never Made Me Feel Like Killing Anyone: “If we want to look at why Adam Lanza walked into an elementary school and opened fire on a bunch of children and adults, it’s not video games we need to be looking at. I recently saw someone using a league of legends cheat – and they dashed through the game like five times faster than everyone else. We need to ask who was paying attention to him, and had anyone noticed something was wrong with him emotionally would the mental health care he probably needed have been both accessible and affordable?”

On Deep Sea Science Fiction

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But I didn’t grow up in the Golden Age of the ’30s and ’40s. When I was a child, as suffused as popular cultural depictions of SF still were (and continue to be) with spacefaring imagery, other themes, speculations, and what-ifs had begun crowding in at the edges. In fact, as a voracious and omnivorous upper-elementary reader, I read an enormous amount of juvenile science fiction without ever taking my adventures off-planet.

Instead there were contemporary riffs on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, and many, many deep sea adventures.

For those keeping track, it’s just about one year since my first time writing for the fine folks at the Canadian Science Fiction Review, and though my debut was an essay on Heinlein, I hadn’t returned to the form again before today. (Though my book coverage may have sometimes landed somewhere between a full-blown essay and straightforward review.)

There’s more upcoming. I’ll keep you posted.

2012 Statistical Roundup

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Word Press, whose software powers this site, sent me my site stats for 2012, which included no big surprises. This site has grown modestly since its launch in the latter half of 2011. Reading the story behind the numbers, these are the main take-away points:

a) at least as many visitors are random Googlers as people who are familiar with my writing

b) the larger part of the site growth is from an increase in the number of evergreen items, thus drawing more of these random Googlers, who, therefore, rarely leave comments

c) I’m a writer but not a blogger and I know it, so I don’t expect that to change in the future.

What about my more general writing stats? I’ve started writing regularly at three major new markets this past year, and have published at least once at five or six additional “new” places beyond that. I think I’ve probably pitched my writing to 50 or more markets so we’re talking about a success rate only somewhat in excess of 10 percent, which could be worse, I suppose. For 2013 I have my eye on at least two additional writing spaces that I really hope to get involved in.

My best month in terms of sheer volume was January (while still in Costa Rica and not doing any other work besides writing), but my best month in terms of writing income was December (while working a full-time job). So by the end of the year my average pay per job, per word, per hour, however you want to slice it, had improved considerably.

As far as page views go, my writing at Care2 ranks highest, with one of my articles last month hitting close to 30, 000 readers, while the number commenting was less than 300. One of my all-time favourite pieces, listed under my portfolio page, received over 500 comments, but I don’t have any additional stats for that piece, and there isn’t always a direct correlation between comments and page views, so I can’t assume 50, 000 or more people read it. That said, I’m thinking my all-time most popular piece must be in that ballpark, even if I don’t know which one it actually is.

Number of times editors have fought over me because they simultaneously wanted me to cover the same thing for their own publications: twice. Different publications each time.

Number of things I’ve learned about improving my writing: lost count.

Blurbed

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Side-note to my previous post: when my review copy of Bones of the Old Ones arrived, I was pleased to discover that the top blurb on the inside jacket cover was actually mine, quoted from my review of Jones’ previous novel. Though I’m not mentioned by name, I immediately recognized my Green Man Review coverage from early 2011. I didn’t actually see it until after I’d finished the book, when I idly checked out some of the jacket copy.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised since I had already seen I was the leading blurb on the Amazon page for this latest title (and a longer quotation from that same review is also on the Amazon page of the original book in question). But it’s cool to have it on paper in a book I actually held in hand.

Since I frequently receive advanced reading copies, it is possible, if my reviews are published early enough, to end up on the jacket cover of a first edition, though what’s more likely to happen is for praise for one book to end up on the jacket of a later book, as was the case here. It’s simply good luck that I signed up to cover this one late enough that I received a finished book, blurbing my earlier review, rather than an ARC which would probably have included no jacket copy.

My first time being blurbed? One of Neal Asher’s Polity novels, probably about eight years ago. But I never actually held a finished copy of the book.

Reading and Writing

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I have book reviews due this forthcoming Tuesday (the 4th) and Wednesday (the 5th), for two different publications. But I`ve also been finding bits of time here and there to work on some non-review titles. I`m listening to an audiobook of Cory Doctorow`s For the Win, which is, as always, enlightening. Somehow his fiction packs so much information about politics, technology, and culture, it competes with non-fiction for its educational content.

Speaking of, I`m also reading How Mathematics Happened: The First 50, 000 Years, by Peter Rudman. Not the first book I`ve read about the history of math, and probably not the last. It`s pretty good, and I`m learning something new with each page. I`m also enjoying the “fun questions“ peppered throughout the text. As the go-to book on the subject, I think I would still give Tobias Dantzig`s classic, Number, the nod. But I`m happy I picked this one up.

Lastly, I`m working on Asimov`s robot stories, via his Robot Visions collection. It`s the last of his major series I hadn`t gotten around to reading yet.

As far as writing goes, I have the aforementioned reviews, I`ve agreed on deadlines for two posts for Care2, I`m writing a little something up for Green Man, and that takes me to the end of the week (it`s a busy week). After that, I think what I`d like to do is work on a couple of essays I`ve previously pitched to AE, and put together a pitch or two for a local magazine I`ve been in touch with. Those are things I`ll give myself `til the end of the month for, since there are no impending deadlines attached, and, hey, it`s holiday time. I want to relax at least a little.

Near CompuDeath Experience

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It began when I spilled soup on my laptop. A hearty, but nevertheless very liquid chicken soup. And my tiny little Inspiron Mini kept chugging along, as I mashed the keys with a damp cloth, and tried to ensure all the liquid had been drained out.

But as it began to freeze up and I went for a reboot, it . . . didn’t. It shut down on command but wouldn’t even consider starting back up. All the little indicator lights were dark and for all I knew the circuitry was entirely fried.

I left it, hoping that, with time, any invading liquid would evaporate away. The next morning, I hit a button and it started to turn on — only to release a high-pitched squeal like a burn patient coming out of a medically-induced coma. I put it back to sleep. That night, it finally booted up properly. But the keyboard didn’t work. Not one jot.

It’s surprising how much you can do with just a trackpad, as a matter of fact. I even realized I could technically write an email, simply by opening up my bookmarks, and labouriously copying and pasting individual letters with the trackpad’s clicks. But that ain’t gonna fly for a working writer. I need my QWERTY. So now begins the hunt for a replacement work computer.

State of the Freelancing Address

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Lately I’ve felt a bit overstretched. In one sense this has been an issue of the last month or two, as I started a new full-time job while continuing to work nights at a previous one, all while simultaneously trying to meet writing commitments, provide some TLC to the new house and yard, and ramping up on the final chores leading up to a wedding.

On the other hand, things have really been rather consistently insane since coming back to Canada nearly eight months ago. Upon arriving, I began the work at multiple jobs which has never really stopped, hunting for the house I have been currently neglecting (though my better half has more than taken up the slack), planning that wedding which was, at the time, still several months away.

And now that the wedding is over, the house is being lived in, and jobs have been won, I still haven’t quite reached the point of being able to take a breather. There are post-wedding chores, there’s the settling-in period of the new job, which has ratched-down in intensity, but is still keeping me quite busy, and the house which remains unfinished.

I want to make it clear that I’m not complaining here. All of these things are good things. I’m thankful at how everything worked out over the last eight months. I (or we, rather) looked for a job and got it, planned a wedding and had it, hunted for a house and bought it.

To be frank, I thought we were a bit full of it when we said we were going to come from Central America and get all these major things done, in such a brief time span, just like that. I think we both rather surprised ourselves.

But you know, I’ve missed deadlines for my writing for the first time since I’ve been doing this. Only two or three times, and not more than a couple days’ delay, but I missed them all the same. And I have these pitches and these contacts and these markets I was on the verge of breaking into, and it’s all gone on hold a bit.

In Costa Rica I had a surplus of time and thus had a little trouble keeping to a schedule, at least as far as unassigned work went. But with experimentation and query after query, even at only a few hours a day, I began connecting with new markets, making more sales,to the point that we could actually live off of this. Then I came back to Canada and got a real job again.

I don’t regret this, except in the same sense that I regret not being independently wealthy and not needing a paycheque. I’ll admit frankly that I appreciate career and financial stability, and I’m happy to have that, even though careers take up a lot of one’s free time.

In a couple of months, though, when the debt’s all paid off and my work hours ease up, I think I need to pick up where I left off and start pushing myself on the writing again. I have promising story leads to follow up, some unfinished fiction (yes, I do dabble in fiction) that deserves to be finished and shopped around, and some would-be publishers I’ve yet to produce anything for.

I really do want to get back to it.

One Book, A Hundred Ways to Review It

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In the last week or so I’ve met (barely) deadlines for book reviews for the Library Journal, Winnipeg Free Press, and AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, each of which has fairly specific editorial needs.

Left to my own devices, I’ll tend to write something in the neighbourhood of 800 words for a book review. I will frequently personalize it, writing in a conversational, informal style. The Free Press’ book reviews style guide is fairly standard for a newspaper, with a firm word limit of 600 and an avoidance of the personal pronoun. This is not a tremendous adjustment, but it does mean I will write a different review than I would for the same book at a different outlet.

By contrast, AE is stylistically more open, and flexible on length. My editor over there will frequently latch onto something in my review and ask me to expand it, turning fairly straightforward book coverage into a more far-reaching critical essay. When you consider the subject matter and audience, this makes sense. A sci-fi magazine talks specifically about sci-fi, and will want to bring to the table more than surface-level insight about its area of expertise.

As a result I’m often very proud of my finished product over at AE, but put more time in on these essays than the general audience reviews I publish elsewhere. Exceeding 1000 words in this pieces is not unusual. I also draw more deeply on my literary knowledge to make connections as a matter of course, and frequently find myself looking up minute details of related works in the process of writing.

Then there’s the Library Journal, which poses an entirely different challenge. Writing a review that gets at the essential point in a mere 175 words is the ultimate exercise in brevity. I’ve learned to quickly identify the audience and the essential details of the book as concern that audience (including the basic review question: whether the book achieves its intent), which is about all you can do in that space.

It’s certainly possible to spend more time at one of these micro-reviews than one in which one is able to meander, perhaps because an extra step is involved: cutting and rephrasing all the extraneous information until the necessary level of conciseness is reached.

These aren’t my only review venues, of course, but they do represent a nice variety in terms of editorial and stylistic expectations. Perhaps you didn’t realize there was so much to writing a book review. I didn’t quite know myself.

Tuesday Links (05/22/12)

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The Revolution SF Watercooler: HP Lovecraft and Racism: “The real issue is whether a reader finds his work worthy despite the worst parts of his personality.”

The Avengers Inside Hopper’s Iconic Nighthawks Painting: Yep.

Going to a rock concert is different when you’re 60: This guy writing for the Globe and Mail? I know this guy. Awesome guy.