I just finished what’s hopefully the last of the major rewrite of Blackjack Davy. It’s not ready to go, but almost.

This was the first “real” story I put any time into once I started writing. It’s based on the folk song of the same name and, in the original version, it sailed very close to the lyrics. I always thought it was pretty good, it received a couple of nice rejections to the few places I sent it, and it got me into Clarion. It happened to be the first story critiqued at Clarion and, overall, it was well received. I took a lot of notes on what people said and I talked about some more with Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Andy Duncan, and Jeff Ford. Most of the advice was regarding straightening out the timeline–the original begins with a flashback and then it jumps around in time quite a bit–and there were a few things here and there people mentioned.

Nina hammered it for not having enough detail so I did some research on late 19th century Montana (the best resource, believe it or not, comes from Teddy Roosevelt’s The Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, from when he was rough riding all over Montana. But Jeff’s comments influenced me the most. I gave a strong shot of the surreal and now it’s hard to tell where the truth lies and what actually happens.

I decided to tackle it again a few months ago and, while rereading it, I couldn’t believe how bad it was. Way too many do-nothing attributions, skipping timeline, ugh. One person (who shall go unnamed) said it was far too long for what actually happens. Well, that’s one piece of advice I ignored completely: it went from 6700 words to 9300. That’s nearly a 30% growth! But before I think it felt long because of the wasted words. Now the story is really about stasis, boredom, and how perceptions warp over time. The goal, of course, is to suggest incremental changes over a long period of time without boring the shit out of the reader.

So it needs another combing over and out it goes. It’s going to Scifi.com first, I’ve decided.

Spurs are almost certain to blow their shot at qualifying for Europe via their league standing despite the fact that it’s a completely doable scenario. With three games to go and 48 points to their name, they play Aston Villa (on 47 points), Middlesbrough (on 49), and Blackburn a few spots back.

Boro have an interesting set of matches before them but enjoy a game in hand over Spurs. They have Newcastle, Liverpool, Spurs, and Man City for their final four games. With the up and down nature of all the teams involved it’s virtually impossible to predict the outcomes of these games. Villa see some similar teams in Spurs, Man City, and Liverpool for their last three.

The infuriating part of all this is that, in my heart, I know Spurs will go 1-1-1 in these games to finish with 52 points and in 9th place which gets them nothing, nor should it. They’re a half-assed side who don’t deserve a spot in Europe. This team perpetually cannot turn the corner and headlines always seem to be focused on how well Spurs do financially rather than on the pitch. Yes, it’s great that Asians inexplicably buy replica jerseys by the boatload but unless this translates into paying for decent players instead of bolstering stock prices, it’s no fun being a fan. While spending extravagantly on big names isn’t good for the bottom line nor does it underwrite guaranteed success, it at least shows motivation to build a team who might strive to win something. No, it seems fairly clear that the goal is to create a stable team–one good enough to not get relegated but not worth risking any cash on trying to make them better than average.

Historically, the team’s been a cup side rather than a league contender but come on. The last decade has seen them win only the League Cup once (and finished runner-up once) and that’s it. Highest place in the Premiere league is 7th and that was back in 94/95. From 1981 to 91, in contrast, they won the FA cup three times, won two Charity Shields, and nabbed the UEFA Cup.

Sad, really.

From http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com:

• Novel: A work of 40,000 words or more.
• Novella: A work of at least 17,500 words but under 40,000 words.
• Novelette: A work of at least 7,500 words but under 17,500 words.
• Short story: A work of under 7,500 words.

I would add flash stories to this list as anything under 1,000 words although a lot of places define it as under 500.

Though it greives me to say this, I think my natural inclination is to write novelette-length stories. Stories are accordion-like though, meaning most decent stories can be expanded or contracted to varying lengths. The main question, however, seems to be what the “right” length for a story might be, at least for a specific market. John Kessel’s short stories impress me because they’re very condensed and he says a lot without writing thousands upon thousands of words. Likewise, I couldn’t believe that Jeff Ford’s story “Creation” is only 4800 words. I would have guessed it was at least twice that long because it has definite weight to it, as does many of Kessel’s.

On the other side of the equation is Andy Duncan who said at Clarion, “It’s hard to kick a dog around in under 3000 words.” My favorite stories of his lean to the long side. “The Chief Designer” is a hefty 18K words, and “The Pottawatamie Giant” weighs in at 8K. Jeff Ford’s other stuff I really like is in the 8-12K region as well, and Eric Schaller’s excellent “The Five Cigars of Abu Ali,” one of the best stories I’ve read in a long while, is just over 11K. These are the kinds of layered, significant stories I want to write.

The hard part? Keeping a slush reader interested for that long. It’s not too hard to keep someone’s attention for a thousand words, which only equates to a few pages. It becomes much harder around two thousand words to keep someone interested and if the manuscript has a physical weight to it–meaning a stack of pages–the reader damn well better be motivated to see how the story comes out. Until you’re an established writer you will not get the benefit of the doubt, and even established writers aren’t allowed to blather on at length about unimportant things.

Most of my pre-Clarion stories are bloated by do-nothing attributions, junk like “he fiddled with his collar” or “she shifted her weight from foot to foot.” It’s amazing how this can push what should be a 4-5K word story into the 7-8K range. However, the four longer stories I have on deck are mostly existential musings in uncommon settings: a 19th century Montana ranch, a 19th century Minnesota farm, very early 20th century rural Manitoba, and late 21st century southern California. In short, none of these are “gimmie” locales. They require a lot of details because these precise location in space/time are essential to the story. So that’s a bunch of words just to establish the scenery and the scenery’s not even the point of the story. Each story deals with the somewhat large topics of love, myth, truth, and identity.

I think they’ll all naturally fall into the 8-10K range. But man, that’s gonna be a lot of work. Being that long, the story will be judged that much more critically and therefore must be better.

I’m finding I stay fresher if I switch between writing/editing long stuff and short stuff and there’s a definite feeling of accomplishment just mailing something out. This means less stuff goes out in the short term but, hopefully, it also means quality over quantity.

Ah, Homer. I had a long talk about “The Iliad” with brother Todd last night and it really makes me want to read it again. Is it my favorite book? That’s tough to say. Probably. Achilles is one my favorite characters of all time and it’s hard to come up with a book I could say is better than “The Iliad.”

The conversation also made me want to re-read all the tragedies. Well, maybe not all the tragedies–I don’t think I need to read Aeschylus’ “The Persians” anytime soon–but another look at the Orestia, The Bacchae, the Oedipus plays and Antigone…all so very, very good. I read them all in a chunk in 1997. Now that the saga list has run low maybe I’ll add a tragedy or two between books.

I forgot to mention yesterday that while my evening reading is John Kessel, my lunchtime reading is The Kalevala and oh man, is it good.

I bought it a few weeks before Clarion last year and read the first dozen chapters or so before I had to plunge into the Clarion instructors’ stuff and I never quite got back to it even though I remembered liking it a great deal. I thought about picking up an Icelandic Saga but then saw the Kalevala and thought might as well go back to it.

And oh man, is it good.

It’s epic poetry so it’s not the easiest thing to sit down and read and I often have to read passages over again to get what’s going on but the rhythm of the poetry is amazing. Like most old stuff it take a bit to get into the groove but when it takes y0u over, look out.

I’m on chapter 14 where Lemminkäinen just got ambushed, killed, and cut into pieces then dumped into the river.

Kind of interesting how much the translations differ.

Best line from Deadwood last night came in the opening minutes from Al Swearengen:

“The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more fucking punishment in store. “

To continue a theme.

Last week…	and this week

Believe me, it keeps growing. And growing. And growing until the cat becomes impossible to find at 10:30 when you call for the king of wild to come inside. We have another three weeks or so, I estimate, until Heiner starts bringing in moles.

Dead or alive. Or rather dead and alive.

In other news I just started reading John Kessel’s collection “The Pure Product” and I’m really enjoying the stories. They’re so easy to read but aren’t in any way “light.” I will go over several of these stories in detail to begin picking out the good stuff. Pick pick pick.

I didn’t write much last week which is and isn’t a disappointment. In terms of writing progression I’m beginning to understand that this is a geologic progression, at least for me. I feel like I’m writing better, cleaner stuff than I was a year ago and that’s a start. On the other hand, I feel my brain beginning to compress after a couple weeks of hardcore writing and editing and it feels good to let it expand. I had a dream the other night that won’t leave me alone. It’s making a strong case that it’s a story.

I started a new story called, “Border Crossing,” inspired by a song by Jimmy Cliff and Joe Strummer. The story has nothing to do with the song, in principal at least. But I guess they’re both about oppression and what people choose and choose not to do when confronted by it. I started it liking it very much but I’ve cooled on it considerably. It seems like something that’s been done before both good and bad and doesn’t add much to the conversation. We’ll see. It’s hard to judge a story when it’s only half done.

I was kvetching a while back about the difficulty in taking all the stuff I’d learned at Clarion and fitting it into my bunch of pre-Clarion stories I’ve written. Boris Layupan, a Clarion chum of mine, passed on a word advice he picked up from an author at another workshop (I think it was Dean Wesley Smith): try rewriting an old story rather than just editing it.

My initial reaction (and this was months ago) was, “Yeah, right.” I mean, I’d already struggled with a story once, tamed it, and put it on paper. My pre-Clarion writing wasn’t bad, it just needed some massaging. It didn’t need a total overhaul, right?

Right?

Well, I’m having serious second thoughts on this position. I’m still working on “Black Jack Davy” and the nip here and tuck there I expected has turned into a major rewrite. So major, in fact, there’s an audible clunk when the story changes tracks from the original to the new. I thought I could do some cutting and pasting, spackle over a few cracks, add a little more depth and description and things would be fine.

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

Turns out this is a new story. The characters, setting, and basic plot remain the same but the rest–and I mean everything–is different. What else is there to a story besides characters, setting, and plot? Quite a bit, actually. I have a new appreciation for the subconscious mind at work while writing. The tone of the story is completely different and I can’t quite put my finger on how it is, but it is.

I’m also discovering that I’m now writing three kinds of stories: short (under 1K words), medium (2-5K words), and long (8-10K words.) The vast majority of my pre-Clarion stories weighed in between 6-8K. If I squeezed the air out them, most would fall in the medium range of 2-5K but, as described above, that would require complete rewrites and I’m simply not in love with many of them to justify the work required. Likewise, “big” stories are akin to running a marathon. You can’t just decide one afternoon that you’ll sit down and write a 10K story and pull it off, or at least I can’t.

“Black Jack Davy” is a big story, or at least this version is, but I have a very real plan for it. It’s long and wide and covers a long period of time but there’s a fast-moving undercurrent and things change rapidly beneath the surface. Or at least that’s the goal. It’s ballooned from about 7K at Clarion to about 10K now but there’s more story to it now. I hope it’s essential backstory as opposed to the stuff you throw out there just so you, as the author, can learn about your characters. But it reminds me of another story I wrote at Clarion and discussed at length with Kelly Link. Often, a single word or phrase can illuminate a character’s entire background for the reader but other times it just can’t and you need to go into more detail about a person’s emotional make-up. Making a story compelling for 10K words is not an easy task. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s begun.

Last week…	and this week

We had a couple good showers during the week followed by plenty of sun. We hope some of those things pushing up through the soil are plants, not weeds. I happened to be flipping through cable channels the other day and saw a snippet from “Little Shop of Horrors,” starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin and it reminded me a little too much of some of the 4′ thorned weeds of terror in the corners of the yard last year.

I watched San Jose versus Chivas USA yesterday play to a 3-3 draw in a fantastic game. Spartan Stadium rots: it’s far too narrow. Even though I want Chivas USA to get stuffed every game, I have to admit having them in the league adds a lot of spice to MLS. I’ve never really had a team to hate in MLS before (although Dallas and DC United have come close) but the fact that the club and the league have done a lot to trump up the US vs. Mexico aspect of any match versus Chivas…well, it works. How long can it last though?

Real Madrid is up 3-1 over Barca at the moment. Vamos Galacticos! Not that it matters at this point of the season.

I watched the mid-week game between Chelsea and Bayern Munich and was a little irritated at the end. Bayern’s Ballack totally took a dive in the dying minutes and was awarded an undeserved penalty. Chelsea still came out 4-2 winners but that illegit goal gives Bayern a lot of hope for the return match. I understand the game moves fast and referees are only human but 1) Ballack is a notorious diver, and 2) is there some reason controversial incidents can’t be reviewed after the match? The goal should stand but Ballack should get at least a one-match ban. Otherwise there’s no way to stop diving, a problem plaguing the sport.

Tom Petty said it best. The waiting is the hardest part.

I’ve currently got four stories pending at various markets with a bunch more ready to go. I’m finding that it’s easier to keep moving if I have a number of irons in the fire simultaneously, so to speak. Writing and editing short shorts (around 1K) is a lot easier than working on the longer ones, but the longer ones obviously are more ambitious. I’m seriously reworking “Black Jack Davy,” a Clarion submission story and one that’s got favorable rejections to the few places I originally sent it. Post-Clarion, I realized that it was a mess mostly due to the skipping timeline and general wordiness. So I’m trimming and getting it ready to do the rounds at the pro markets and might give it a shot at the Writers of the Future (WOTF) contest.

I wondered if I got into Scifiction.com by next week (which I probably won’t) whether it will get back to me in time for the next WOTF contest deadline, ending May 31. The answer: probably not, at least according to the Black Hole Listing site, where writers report market response/rejection times.

I copied today’s results (4-5-05) into Excel and pasted the results below. SFWA Pro markets are listed first, sorted by average response time followed by other high-quality markets I’m most familiar with. Columns are the market, average response time in days, minimum (i.e. fastest) response time, maximum (i.e. slowest) response time, and data points (i.e. submissions to the Black Hole.)

So what does this mean? I dunno. Most of the averages are consistent with my experience, although Cicada averages 100 days; mine was 160. Believe me, you’re counting those minutes over two months of wondering what’s taking so long, especially if you think the story is good.

Suppose I have a story I think has real merit and deserves to be in only one of the “biggest” pro sci-fi/fantasy markets. For the sake of argument, let’s say I send it to F&SF, Strange Horizons, Analog, Scifi.com, Asimov’s, and Realms of Fantasy and because of their lack of vision, they all reject it. If all of these magazines hit their average response times, it’ll take 10-11 months for the story to make this circuit. And that’s assuming the story is sent out the very next day after receiving the rejection.

Furthermore, I get the feeling that stories that do sell get even longer response times. This certainly seems to be the case for Realms of Fantasy, where stories plucked from the slush pile take 6-8 months until the author is notified the story has been accepted. There’s nothing saying after 6 months the editor can’t say, “Close, but nah.” That makes the wait potentially even longer across the board for good stories.

Still, what’s the alternative? The lesson I’ve learned is quality over quantity. When I first started sending stuff out (just over a year-and-a-half, but it seems like an eternity ago) I had the exact opposite mentality; Send lots of pretty good stories and eventually something will stick. I found out that if you send out lots of pretty good stories you get lots of pretty good rejections.

The only way to sell a story is to really work it over patiently and make it as good as it can be. Good stories sell. Pretty good stories don’t. The trick is to get as many good stories in circulation to help ease the waiting game, so you’re never more than a month or so out from an expected response.

And then there’s the small matter of whether stories you think are good really are good, and that even good stories won’t work for all markets. That’s for another day.

Major League Soccer kicked off Saturday to enter its tenth season and it’s back up to twelve teams. The opening match (or “First Kick” as dubbed by the league’s marketers who have managed to tag naming rights to everything under the sun) featured Chivas USA, one of the exapansion teams this year, and defending champs DC United. It was scheduled to air on ABC.

Well, the pope died and the game got the boot. Luckily it was only booted over to ESPN2 but that didn’t help those of us who set the VCR believing it would be on ABC. Why does this always seem to happen to MLS? The major networks never seem to miss a chance to pre-empt soccer.

To make it worse, ABC guaranteed continuing coverage and breaking news after the pope’s death. Excuse me? What news can possibly break after he’s dead? And I’m sorry, but under no circumstances can you call the death of an 84-year-old man “tragic” unless he was totally with it and it was the result of an accident.

Bulletin to America
Death is natural. It happens to all of us at one time or another. You do not need to fight it at all costs (meant both figuratively and literally.) We do not it “owe” it God, to ourselves, or most of all to the very old, the very sick, and the brain dead to defy the natural order of things and try to see if we can break the record for keeping someone alive who should be dead and won’t be getting any better.

In the end, DC United won 2-0 and the pope is still dead. It’s okay to celebrate one and mourn the other, but far be it for me to suggest which is which.

If you’ve ever wondered how many bags of mulch (2 cubic ft./ea.) it takes to cover my yard, the correct answer if fifty-five. Yes, that’s fifty-five. If you think that’s ridiculous, you’re right but you also probably haven’t seen my yard. The fellas we bought it from liked to garden so they landscaped the entire thing. No mowing which is nice, but there’s the small matter of laying down fifty-five bags of mulch in the spring. Now that winter has decided to release his icy grip on the Badger State we can expect April showers in abundance. And Things Will Begin to Grow.

Our backyard will go from this…	to this
And from this…	to this

Luckily our dog also shrinks down to a much more manageable size in spring as well.