Otherwise Idle Moments

I need to be a better manager. Since I'm self-employed in this Writing thing, I need to force myself to be much more productive than I otherwise would be, to realize my own potential and profit. The trick, I think, is to consider the long-term.

I've never had a Good Boss. Whether that's because I'm almost entirely self-motivated or because there are very few good managers is up to the end. It could also be that I haven't had a good boss yet. I've had a few asshole bosses, and a few ineffectual team-building bosses. If I wanted to be part of a team, I'd have asked for stock options.

(I just swallowed a bug, but I'm pressing on. Stupid tropics.)

Long-term thinking seems to be very important, but not in the sense of "There'll be plenty of time to write later." I need to force myself to write now so that there'll be a later where I can force myself to write for a living. I suspect, although I can't be sure, that this will be easier.

But who the hell knows? As for me, get back to work. My door is always open, except when it's closed. Then I'm either having sex or taking a conference call. The sound is about the same.

A hand-crafted weapon of war

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Wread This First -

Ghostweight (Yoon Ha Lee)
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue #52
Great/Good/OK/Bad

I read "the mercenaries in their starfaring kites had cindered cities" Oh, hell yeah. Throughout this story there are tantalizing glimpses of space-kites and folded-paper weapons of mass destruction. This was a cool enough visual to draw me in, but then I drowned in backstory and exposition.

I'm not sure what side these starfaring kite mercenaries are on, for instance, and I couldn't unravel the main character's background. I also felt let down by the ending. There were a few too many "reveals" that the plot had not prepared me to be shocked by. Of special note: I do not understand Kiriet's motivation.

Still, evocative kite imagery (and clever use of the word "haptics") keeps it from being a waste of time.

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

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Reading - ?

*154

My Writing Game

On ePublishing:

Suppose you're a heggler who's snuck past the gate guard into the Castle of Art, but you've only two eggs for sale, and they're rotten. Nobody's going to buy your eggs, except maybe to throw at you. You're going to have to offski back and get some fresh eggs, then sneak back in. So you do, with a dozen fresh eggs. Some people buy your eggs, but you don't make much because you've only got a dozen eggs to sell. So you go back outside and you get your chickens in a row and start them pumping out eggs. Now, with all these eggs, you might consider hiring a few folk to check that they're fresh, but after that you can sneak past the gate guard into the Castle of Art with impunity and everybody will buy your eggs and you'll be a Happy Heggler.

If that's what you really want to be.

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A heggler is a seller of eggs. Since the common assumption is that a writer is not a seller of words, I'm going to start calling myself a hwordler.

My path to riches is assured.

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

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Reading - A First Lesson From The Challenge
(Dean Wesley Smith)

...awesome.

*153

Reverse Plotting

The first book I ever tried to reverse plot was "Heir to the Empire" (Timothy Zahn), and the subsequent series of two books "Dark Force Rising" and "The Last Command". The results were telling.

I started the reverse plot because I could never figure out how exactly one of the characters (in this case Luke Skywalker) happened to be on the same planet as all the other characters at the same time as an Imperial attack. Lando Calrissian lived there, and Han and Leia were there for some well-established reason or another which I can't recall at the moment.

It turned out that the reason Luke came to the planet was he found some device and R2D2 mentioned that he had seen Lando with a similar device. That's it*. It's so tenuous that it's almost a throwaway line, but it works. That's how the entire series is organized.

What that tells me is that I don't need to worry too much about the Middle as long as the Beginning and End work. There are two advantages to this: (1) I write faster when I'm not agonizing about stringing stuff together, and (2) I feel free to Get On With It. The reason it was tenuous is that Mr. Zahn knew that, for this story, nobody would care how Luke got there so much as what he did when he did. Bogging down the story with a complicated detective scene wouldn't have been very interesting.

So that's why I'm going to stop worrying and love the handwave. This is not the plot you're looking for.

*Nerd Bonus, though. 10 years and ~billion Star Wars books later he tied it all together.

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Ha! I don't know what's going on here, but I like it. I still find it hard to believe that we, citizens of the future, do not have cities of the future to live in.

We keep spending all our money on blowing shit up.

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1000 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"
Short Story "Science Up Some Love"

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Reading - ?

*152