In 2007 I attended World Horror Con with thehollowbox, and for all of the sessions we made it to, I kept pretty extensive notes. I'd gone with the intention of doing a bit of an experiment -- a news-style writeup of the sessions, similar to conference writeups I've done for Gamasutra. There was nothing like this available for spec fic conventions, as far as I knew, and that was a shame, considering the amount of wisdom and expertise doled out at these things.

I did actually get interest from a couple of publications for the piece, and made the mistake of committing initially to one that had expressed interest first. They made some comments, requested a rewrite, then went on a hiatus that lasted months longer than they'd claimed, severely dating the material. And then when they came back online, they weren't answering my emails. So what would have been a pretty interesting thing at the time wound up collecting dust. Given the current discussion on WHC 2008, I figured it might be a good time to just kick it out for free, since I think a lot of this material -- particularly the Grand Master panels and the Joe Landsdale interview -- is extremely interesting and ought to be available for common consumption.

I do believe that there is a great deal of lost wisdom from undocumented conventions. One of the old-fashioned tendencies of the "World" conventions especially is a distinctly poor attitude toward the press. WHC only offered a press pass if you had a TV network and a camera; this behavior toward potential press coverage is very self-defeating (and unprofessional, if one considers the bar of professional conferences in other industries), and both creates and is potentially created by the generally casual tone taken with convention reports. Social reports are great, and it's true that a majority of convention attendees are likely there for the social aspects, but it does mean that a lot of knowledge goes unrecorded. So I thought I'd try my hand at a different style, and here it is.


World Horror Convention 2007 Report
Erin Hoffman

World Horror Con 2007, held in Toronto this year, packed a heavy luminary punch in a low population setting. It was nearly impossible to cross the small convention area without stumbling across three or more grand masters of the craft. The event's great strengths were in its program participants, though the small scale venue in the heart of Toronto had much to offer on the social side, too, with a terrific con suite provided by the folk from Ad Astra and a friendly membership that suited the openness of the city and the wild variety of discussion available.

I should say by way of disclaimer that while I have great interest the use of horror in fiction and in the work of particular horror authors such as Gary Braunbeck and Brian Keene, I write and read primarily fantasy and science fiction. Despite this, particularly with genre-breaking writing masters such as Joe Lansdale and David Morrell in attendance, there was more than enough fodder for my hungry brain at WHC.

The convention was held at the Marriott Toronto Downtown Eaton Centre, and the late-March weather, often unpredictable, was stunning, crisp and bright. At just under 500 attendees, WHC had enough of a con presence to ensure you saw a few badges cruising downtown, while still leaving enough breathing room for personal comfort. None of the sessions suffered from poor space or overcrowding, and all in all, the place ran like a well-oiled machine, but felt like a smaller town community picnic, and the locals’ enthusiasm for hosting such an international event was contagious.

These sessions, provided in chronological order, were some of the highlights. A full conference schedule remains online at http://www.whc2007.org/. I also attended and enjoyed “What Exactly is Horror?”, “What Do You Mean 'Edit'? How Hard Can it Be to Put Together a 'Year's Best' Anthology”, “Young Blood: New Writers to Look Out For”, but this article can only be so long.



Horror Writers Association Presents: What Are Agents and Editors Looking For, and Never Want to See Again?

Editors Don D'Auria, Ellen Datlow, Liz Gorinsky, George Mann, and agents Josha Bilmes and Dorothy Lumley on Thursday morning discussed common mistakes in query letters and their preferences for what to receive.

Joshua Bilmes wanted queries to have more than “my name is”: agents “want to know about you,” he said, and are interested in the personalities of those they'd represent. Lacking a prior introduction (such as a personal meeting at a convention), something in the query letter should let the agent know that you're an interesting person to work with. Bilmes pointed out that most query letters devote four paragraphs to their book and nearly none to themselves as individuals. But “don't be cute,” he said, and Liz Gorinsky agreed, advising authors to do their research.

“It's easier to go wrong in the submission package than it is to go right,” she said, and recommended keeping things short and testing the query letter on three unbiased outside observers. Dorothy Lumley recommended that query letters “just be straightforward”. “You need to have a sense of business,” she added.

“One thing I don't really want to see is that it took you ten years to write this novel,” Don Doria of Leisure Books said. Editors want to know that they're buying an investment, buying into a career or purpose. “It's not worth it to me to buy one book.”

In the case of multiple-book series, the panel agreed that the individual submission should stand on its own, but if an author has plans for continuing books, one paragraph synopsizing the remainder of the series is appropriate, outlining which characters would be returning and major plot points. Liz Gorinsky emphasized that the storyline cannot require the remainder of the series to feel complete.

The agents and editors as a whole preferred that synopses summarize the book from beginning to end; Don Doria said that he often received submissions that present the first three chapters and synopsize the remainder, where he would prefer to see a complete synopsis.

George Mann of Solaris wanted a handle (a three-sentence pitch), then a paragraph, then the full synopsis. “I want to see the full story from start to end.” He emphasized the expression of author competency through the query letter and handle; “I want to know that you know your book well enough to tell me what it is in a page,” he said.

The panel also agreed that they tended to respond better to physical submissions as opposed to email, which is easier to misplace or dismiss.



Short Shrift:Can You Make a Living Writing Short Fiction?

Moderator Gemma Files joined Lucy A. Snyder, L. H. Maynard, Tony Richards, and M. P. N. Sims for a discussion on the life of short fiction in genre writing on Friday afternoon.

Lucy Snyder started off the panel with a series of projected statistics. With no pets, no kids, no health concerns, and shared rent, she postulated that a person could live on $600/month – or, in word count parlance, 20 short stories a month. The poverty level, at $817/month, would break down to 1800 salable words of fiction produced per day. These dizzying and depressing statistics, which provided a clear answer to the panel title, briefly silenced the room.

Panelists agreed that professional short story writers who did not write novels relied on other writing income sour ces, usually nonfiction, to support themselves. “Can you make a living writing? Yes. Can you make a living writing only short stories? I think not,” Gemma Files said.

The panelists also discussed why short fiction has become a niche market. “I think it has to do with fewer people reading in general, and dedicated readers generally want to read novels,” Snyder said. “A short story takes longer to read even though it's shorter.”

However, the panelists agreed that its very density is part of short fiction’s value. “You do it because you love it, you do it because it keeps you going... It lets you experiment, it lets you find your voice. It gives you a chance to learn what you're good at,” Jeff Maynard said.

“So you can't make a living off of short fiction, but you can base a career off of it,” Sims later added. All offered the observation that authors with a background in solid short fiction seemed less likely to become “one hit wonders” when they moved on to novels.

The panel also discussed how the Internet is changing short fiction. Lucy Snyder cited a rise in prevalence of online magazines as an incentive for fiction to be shorter in length due to screen-reading fatigue. Files added a prediction: “The other trend that I see coming out of the 'Net is the return to serialized fiction.” An intriguing idea, considering that lower-tech challenges for serialized fiction, namely unavailability of early stories, are not an issue on the Internet.



How to Build a Better Monster

The monster panel, moderated by Monica S. Kuebler of Rue Morgue Magazine and Burning Effigy Press, was one of the panels I enjoyed the most and also one that least adhered to my expectations for it. I'm a sucker for (as Niven would put it) “critters”, so the panel's name was one that caught my eye, but Kuebler's moderation kept information flowing at a swift pace, and despite the panel's film focus (I'd been hoping for a literature bend) a great deal of what was discussed applied broadly to horror, fiction, and human nature.

Writer and film maker Gregory Lamberson, special effects artist Michael McCarty, pop-culture academic Kendall R. Philips, and award-winning visual artist and WHC Guest of Honor John Picacio weighed in on monsters and their makeup.

Monica started off by asking the panelists for their picks for most effective film monster. Michael McCarty chose Jaws, and discussed the element of the unknown in horror. “There's more a fear of something you can't see than something you see a lot of,” he said, and the panelists discussed the serendipity of Jaws being largely an unseen menace, even though this emerged from budget and not original intent.

Greg Lamberson's pick was Alien. He said that the filmmakers were up against sharp challenges: “ ' How can we do things that haven't been done before? ' ” he paraphrased, and noted that the filmmakers had to make a monster for an audience that had become accustomed to monster parodies. He also noted that the alien was used poorly when it dominated the screen, as opposed to when it was left in the shadows of the viewers’ imagination and perception.

John Picacio's choice was The Invisible Man. “Sometimes the thing...that you're most familiar with, that you don't know has this horrific underbelly that you're just now aware of... is the most frightening.” He cited the closeness of the Invisible Man, its presence in the neighborhood of its victims, and the victims' response to it, as uniquely compelling.

Kendall R. Phillips said that he preferred the unexpected – movies like Dracula and Halloween that took expected tropes and veered away from them.

“Great art has to respond to its own time. The great archetypes work from generation to generation,” Picacio said, adding that artists working with archetypes must find the core universal elements within archetypes and clothe them in the trappings of their time to communicate with new audiences.

“There's a reason why Dracula came from Eastern Europe,” Philips agreed, citing the xenophobia of the time and the regions it influenced.

Greg Lamberson said that there was a certain moratorium on images that applied especially to monsters; a given monster could not be remade too soon after someone else had used the image, and a given image can't be scary twice in the same generation. “Every generation needs their new scary monsters,” he said.

The panel also discussed taking elements of monsters from nature, when creating them; McCarty offered anecdotes on his recent work with Stephen King's The Mist and how the creation team sourced sea creatures for the tentacle-like parts of the monsters that inhabited the mist world. He noted that translating monsters from text to screen often involved worldbuilding and environment consideration, factors that led his team to alter some of King's descriptions to create monsters that could be frightening and convincing living in a visually realized perpetual mist.

When asked about the future, the panelists agreed that a distinct trend toward “human monsters” had taken hold in fiction. “We've got enough monsters in the news,” Picacio offered, and Lamberson said “I think the current trend is toward human monsters,” and especially torturers and their victims. McCarty believed that video games played a role in the escalation of violence in film as filmmakers try to one-up the interactive experience by offering more intense visuals.




World Horror Convention 2007 Grand Master: Joe R. Lansdale

Thomas Monteleone interviewed Joe Lansdale, voted WHC Grand Master this past February, in one of the convention's great highlights on Friday afternoon. Known for the “Texas weird” influence of his East Texas upbringing, as well as his dozens of acclaimed novels and short stories, Lansdale is one of a handful of genre writers hailed by the mainstream. In 2004 his short story “Bubba Ho Tep” was transcribed for the silver screen by Don Coscarelli, and his work spans a variety of media, from theatre to film to comic books and more. Monteleone He began the interview with questions about Lansdale's youth. “I think I learned more in my Journalism classes than my English classes, about writing,” Lansdale said, adding that he'd known he wanted to be a writer at age 9.

Of his childhood, he described his school days and the differing standards of the time. “They'd make sure that your sideburns didn't go below the earlobe.” In high school he'd been asked to resign as vice president of the student body because his hair was too long.

Lansdale also talked about his family. “My father was not a belligerent man, but he was old school.” He told a story about his father having beaten the crap out of the school principal for striking his son, and another, familiar to fans, of a puppy Lansdale'd had that had been digging in a neighbor's flower bed. The neighbor came out, saw the dog, and hit it on the back of the head with a lead pipe, then threw it in the nearby creek. When his father found out about it, “Dad said 'You stay here' and of course I didn't,” Lansdale said, and watched his father knock on the neighbor's door, then hit him in the nose as soon as the man emerged. He spun him by his ankles to flatten the rest of the flowers, then threw him in the creek. The puppy, which Lansdale's father rescued, still survived downstream. Lansdale said he remembered his father crushing aspirin into the dog's water. This from-life story became “Mad Dog Summer,” which in turn became the Edgar Award-winning book The Bottoms.

“My dad used to be a carnival boxer and wrestler, I should probably mention,” he said after these stories, to laughter. His father was born in 1909, when Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley were still alive, and grew up in the Great Depression. “There was no law as we know it now,” he said.

In college Lansdale's hairstyle woes continued. As a student he attained the help of the ACLU in suing his college, which had rejected him because his hair was too long. He won, and attended, studying journalism.

Lansdale's mother, unlike his father, had an 11th grade education, and loved reading. His father saw flats of his first novel, and his mother read them to him. “He was just as proud as he could be,” Lansdale said. See Lansdale's website for details on his beginnings with martial arts, and instruction from his father that grew into a lifetime passion and the development of his own martial arts technique, called Shen Chuan.

Lansdale was no stranger to fighting. “When I was young – I was irritable,” he said. “We lived in a rough area – I didn't start trouble, but I was too quick to fight.”

But Lansdale's ideological shit disturbing was not limited to haircuts. “I was also for civil rights, so I was out of step for my time,” he said. He opposed the Vietnam war, and, though he was in college, dropped out specifically to get drafted, drawing #28. He then scored too high on the Army's IQ test, and they wanted to send him to officer training school. “I said 'you missed the point', and refused.” They offered him Conscientious Objector status, which he also refused, on the grounds that he did not oppose all war, just this one. “I'd've fought in World War II, I told them,” he said. The recruiter told him he should go to Canada, but he also refused, and forced them to arrest him. They sent him home, told him to pack his things for an eighteen month prison stay, then sent him to a psychologist, who, perhaps conveniently, found him unfit. “'You know, we got a feelin' you might shoot somebody you ain't supposed to,' ” Lansdale recalled, laughing softly. He said that in all of this he was fortunate in his timing, for the war was by that time winding down, and already highly unpopular.

He made his first sale in 1973, a nonfiction piece, and for some years after sold articles to True West. Lansdale's first fiction sale was around 1978, “then in 1981 I started selling full time and have been doing it ever since.” He said he'd written between three and four hundred short stories, and said that he'd been inspired by the work and success of David Morrell, listing also as his influences Edgar Rice Burroughs (as his largest), Jack London, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. He said that as a child he'd slept with the Iliad under his pillow because he'd read that Alexander the Great had done so.

Lansdale also read H. G. Welles and George Orwell, and spoke of the differences between genre fiction of that age and this. “There was a time when you could read every science fiction author there was,” he said. In college he read Flannery O'Connor and Hemingway.

Media also played a great part in his early influences. “I watched all these crazy science fiction and horror films,” he said. “You'd watch anything” back then, since SF and horror were so rare. “People don't have love and appreciation for this stuff because it's too easy to get,” he said of modern comics and science fiction.

“Comic books were the most major influence in my entire life,” he said. “They show you that you can blend genres, because they did.” Lansdale's defiance for genre confinements remains a defining aspect of his work. When pressed by Monteleone to choose one genre, he refused and answered, “The Lansdale genre -- it's the only one I know.” But he did show a preference for short fiction, though he maintained he would get tired of doing any one thing exclusively: “If I had my druthers I'd write nothing but short stories... weird short stories, probably.”

“There's nothing weirder than Texas weird,” he said of his life's influences, recalling that he'd moved to Berkeley once and then moved back. He told a story about a blind groundskeeper hired by the church next door, a bizarre personal incident that became the foundation for “Mister Weed-Eater”, and another story about a woman in his neighborhood who became the inspiration for “The Phone Woman”.

Currently he has a new novel, Leather Maiden, coming out with Knopf, and Ridley Scott is working on an interpretation of his The Big Blow. He has another seven or eight options floating around and awaiting exercise as well. An audience member asked about Bubba Nosferatu, and he said it was “out of his hands”.

Monteleone closed by asking Lansdale how he'd changed over time, as his writing has been attributed to a wide variety of genres and subgenres. “I haven't really changed that much,” Lansdale said, “people just started calling what I was writing something else.”



Masters of the Craft

Of the many convention highlights, the grandmaster panel held just before noon on Saturday was undoubtedly, for myself and others, the event's zenith. Hosted by David Morrell, himself a master, the panel included Joe Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson, illustrator Gahan Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert J. Sawyer.

“Although I write thrillers, my heart is deeply embedded in the horror community,” Morrell began, and said that in all the years he'd been attending conventions he'd never seen a panel so distinguished.

“That just means we're old,” Lansdale quipped, and Morrell asked each of the panelists to give their own introduction. Lansdale rattled off his accomplishments, including “thirty-something awards,” and said, “and I'm just kickin' ass in Italy.”

Gahan Wilson introduced himself as “the other Wilson”, and Ramsey Campbell called the rest of the panelists whippersnappers, saying that he'd made his first sale in 1961.

Morrell began the discussion by asking the panelists for their thoughts on developing a career. He noted the “amazing falloff” in fiction for a first appearance; many first novelists never publish again, and many who publish a second will not publish a third. “How do you attain this longevity?” he asked.

“The trick of success, in my opinion, is you...have to have a mad conviction that you're going to succeed. Any sensible examination of your chances to succeed in any of the arts is absolutely hopeless,” Gahan Wilson said, emphasizing “persistence.” “Don't do it unless you're nuts,” he said.

Sawyer said that he'd faced considerable opposition in choosing his career path, but his unwavering position in response came down to his realization that he had only one life to live, and writing was what he loved to do.

F. Paul Wilson said “I never thought I could make a living as a writer.” He went to med school, sent stories in premed to Analog “and anybody who had an address,” he laughed. It took him five years to sell his first story. “And then I developed this obsessive compulsive disorder called writing.” By 1990, he was making more writing than he was as a doctor. “I do think writers should stay in touch with real people instead of writers and editors,” he said, and noted that he still practices medicine one and a half days a week. “Luck is a big part of it,” he said, of success.

“It never occurred to me that I'd fail, I never even thought of it, because I had no other choice,” Lansdale said. “I did anything I had to do to make money,” he said, in terms of paying the bills before his writing would pay for them. “It's not luck in the broader sense of it,” he said, responding to F. Paul Wilson -- “A lot of people can't take defeat.” Of writing, “It's not a romantic profession,” he said, with the loneliness of the craft's practice and the almost sociopathic impersonality of the submission and rejection process. He launc hed into an anecdote on his earliest engagements with that process, saying that in the beginning he sent any story to any market. Then one day he landed a copy of Writer's Market -- “and I thought – 'oh! They specialize!' ” he said, to much laughter. Lansdale also emphasized the support he received from his family. “No wife, no career, I've always said.”

The panelists agreed that another key element to a long term writing career and the longevity Morrell mentioned was remaining true to the drive and vision that powers a person internally; remaining true to oneself. “You have to write what you want to read,” F. Paul Wilson said, and Lansdale added that each of the panelists had created their own genres. “It's better to be a first rate version of yourself than a second rate version of someone else,” Morrell said, an original adage from his writing instruction books and classes.

The discussion then moved to the internal workings of individuals as craftspeople, and the writing life. “It's a constant little parasite,” Lansdale said, of the drive to write. “You never get to rest like other people.”

In describing internal drives and personal themes, Lansdale related an anecdote about Theodore Sturgeon having faced writer's block as a result of depression and anxiety in the face of McCarthyism. A cohort of his gave him a scene -- a woman stepping off of a train -- and instructed Sturgeon to “just write the story,” and his concerns would manifest through the fiction. This turned out to be true, and once Sturgeon began writing, he didn't stop again. Lansdale said that he finds the same to be true of his work; his concerns – he noted the the Iraq war and racism as examples -- come through in his writing.

In terms of following one's own inner drive Morrell noted also that another element of the panelists' distinction in the larger writing world was that they didn't think of themselves as solely writing genre fiction. Working toward solid craft and writing for oneself in that way, he said, gave a writer a degree of immunity to fluctuations in the popularity levels of genre itself. Noted many times throughout the conference was the current low popularity of horror as a whole. Morrell said that, despite this lull, many readers who would recoil at the suggestion of reading horror were nonetheless Stephen King fans, because they did not think of him as a writer of horror but rather as a writer of fiction that they enjoyed.

However, he said, attention to the history of the medium or genre in which one works is of paramount importance. He said that he had a great “pet peeve” in “how uneducated many writers are in the history of horror.” This drew immediate agreement from the panelists.

Lansdale said he was bothered by people who haven't read anything written more than two years ago and think of themselves as horror aficionados. This launched the panel into a discussion of what they considered necessary reading in genre fiction, and a long stream of names, a few of which were contributed by the audience and rapidly taken up by the panelists: C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, Cordwainer Smith, and Theodore Sturgeon populated a majority of the first round. The panelists noted with remorse that “there are people writing in the field who don't even know who these authors are.” The impromptu pantheon listing continued with Jack Finney, Robert Nathan, Charles Beaumont, Robert Aickman, Sax Rohmer, Fritz Leiber, Thomas Tryon, and others, in a rapid exchange that unfortunately streamed ahead of my note-taking speed.




Altogether despite the occasional hiccup in administration the 2007 World Horror Convention was agreed to be a success, with an array of stellar guests, a friendly atmosphere, and a unique and beautiful urban location. I'm pleased to have attended and to have the opportunity to attempt to preserve some of the wisdom dispensed there. Any who might be interested in my notes from sessions mentioned above but not annotated are welcome to contact me via email.

Since it's official, just posting a note here that I'll be teaching a game workshop at this year's Context, a very cool convention in Columbus, OH.

Via the workshop website:

Erin Hoffman: Interactive Narrative and Game Design
(Sunday, September 28th, 11am-2pm)
This workshop explores the fundamentals of video game design through the use of interactive fiction, exploring the places where interactivity and storytelling overlap. No technology or game training is necessary, though a laptop computer is highly recommended. Attendees will be provided with advance reading and will create a small interactive fiction game using the Inform7 Engine.

Erin Hoffman has been working in video games since 1999 on an assortment of genres from massively multiplayer online games to Nintendo DS titles for young audiences to action-RPGs for PC, XBox, and PlayStation2. $20.

I am excited. I've been scattershot working on a design document for an Inform7 game for next year's IFC, and this will be a good opportunity to actually execute on it to have something to show during the workshop as a process example.

thehollowbox and I are also in Gary Braunbeck's masterclass workshop (uberwoot). You should all come and hang out with us! It's a very nice con, excellent staff and programming with a pleasantly small and very friendly population. I had a great time last year and hope to make this a habitual trip along with ReaderCon. Giant cons are not my thing, but these small, well-run ones with great guests are a lot of fun.

In other appearance-type news... I will of course be at GDC next month (Feb 17-24), then in San Diego for the weekend, then back to NY on the 24th for brennye's arrival on the 25th (yay!!). I will be at IMGDC in Minneapolis giving a roundtable on BetterEULA in the end of March, very shortly thereafter in NYC to be on a panel at the Virtual Law Conference April 3-4, likely moving within a few days after getting home from that, and then things should quiet down until skkyechan's wedding in September, closely followed by Context. Said quieting down is of course contingent on thehollowbox and me not moving out to Long Beach during that time, which is possible (and likely even more complicated if we wait until after Context -- hmm).

Whew.

Over the last couple of months I've experienced a strange confluence of influences. Call it collective unconscious or determinism or blind stupid coincidence, some of it happens because of the things I surround myself with while trying to puzzle through the big game of life. For me this is indelibly entwined with writing (which, as I've said, for me is always driven from theme), or perhaps more broadly to anything creative. I have never been able to be creative without first knowing what I am being creative for.

So it was interesting to come across so many recent touchstones for another piece in my ongoing grokking of the world. Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on a short story called "Karma Ex Machina", which centers around a new kind of capitalism, and then for Christmas I received from my mother an audiobook of Bill Clinton's Giving.

It's difficult to talk about this without stirring up a political debate, so I'll just log here that I would rather not go there; I'm more interested in the contents of this book, which were very much a kind of invigorating sugar scrub spa treatment for the soul.

Giving is about the myriad good things going on in the world at any given moment. It is about incredibly smart, successful people coming to the inevitable realization that if we love life we must love our fellow man, and if we love our fellow man we should prevent their suffering where we are able to do so. And if we are smart and if we are looking for the sustainability of global happiness and prosperity we should also increase our own wealth through this process.

It is very much a part of the quality of life rhetoric that has been slowly fighting what often feels to be a losing battle against the insane overwork culture that has gripped the US over the past few decades: that doing what is right, doing what is good, doing what is healthy, leads to prosperity. And business should be about prosperity, so these two things do not come into conflict. When they do they inevitably lead to a self destruction situation.

The "old" capitalism, the capitalism of the 1980s and 90s, existed in a different world where survival was so recently an issue (all of this, probably contaminated by my exposure to thehollowbox, has greatly deepened my interest in the Cold War lately) that the concept of enlightened self interest seemed about as comprehensible as calculus to a chimpanzee. But that's what this is. It is calculus of the soul, an enlightenment where our self interest means the interest of humanity and of the planet, and we should not rest until all of those interests are singing together. This is a core critical thing to me that has only been thrown into greater relief over the last five years. A good job is not a good job unless it is doing good in the world.

But at any rate what I intended here was to highlight, out of the incredible panoply of charitable organizations presented in Giving, a few of my favorite charities. And this stuff is percolating -- jeffhowell posted recently about the high-powered Microsoft dude who left his job after visiting a deeply impoverished school in Nepal. John Wood's story appears in Giving, too. He sold everything he had to buy books for these kids halfway around the world. And now he has a foundation.

But that length is not necessary (though it's pretty cool). With the amount of wealth in the US, or in any civilized nation, the merest fraction of average monthly income makes a world of difference in a third world country. One of the most interesting charities in the book was Kiva.org, an organization that facilitates microloans to developing countries. For $25 you can go in for 1/7 of a business loan to a single individual in Afghanistan who will use that money to open a bakery, grocery, or other small business. And it is a loan -- they start the business, report on it, and you get your money back, to then invest back into the system or keep if you like. Loans like this are what make for genuine rebuilding. On the website you can look at all of the business proposals of these individuals all over the world and contribute directly at any denomination to their cause. And you can see your fellow lenders.

The other program that I found extremely interesting is Chess In the Schools, an initiative to start chess programs in second grade classes in New York. This group has field tested chess programs in second grade classes and demonstrated with raw data that teaching kids chess at this level improves their academic performance and confidence across the board in all subjects. Now they just need to implement it in as many schools as possible. An entire class program can be funded for $3000. They aren't currently open to new joinees, but I am going to be contacting them to see if there's a way Gamewatch can sponsor a particular class. Obviously my interest here is that it boosts math and science in the US, which are frighteningly behind other nations, and it's (yet another) way that shows that games are good for you.

Then there are groups I didn't know about like Ready4Work and Citizens Against Recidivism. It doesn't take much learning about the situation to realize that the revolving door prison systems across the US are destructive, inhumane, and huge cost sinks. I caught Ted Koppel's interview on the Daily Show several weeks ago on this subject, specifically with the breaking point that California is approaching with the intensely overloaded prison system, and the reasons why people who enter it have the odds stacked against them of breaking out. Ready4Work and CAR have proven track records of keeping people out of prison. This cycle has always struck me as one of the most harmful and unnecessary injustices currently in progress in the US, so these two programs really caught my ear.

Heifer International deserves a mention, even though they're one of my favorite charities and I knew well about them before. But they're an amazing and perfect example of a smart charity that perpetuates itself and generates wealth and stability at an astronomical rate.

That's just a tiny handful of the programs profiled in the book, and links to all of them and more are up at the Clinton Foundation website.

Listening to this book really was a kind of therapy. And it was exhilarating in its own way. Much of what Clinton talks about in the opening of the book is the way that things have changed, and the way that the information age has revolutionized charitable work in the US and across the world. We have been steeped in negativity for so long that it becomes easy to forget all of these people working quietly away to do amazing things in the world. The internet has actually changed a lot of that -- made this information easier to access, connected people across th e world, allowed organizations to form around specific niche interests.

And that is how the change comes. You don't have to quit your job or starve yourself or do anything incredibly melodramatic to make a positive change in the world. You just have to lean a little bit. Look at the things you purchase, look at where your money goes, and shift it a little to a company that has committed to going carbon neutral or donates to local charities. My financial planning company has a 401k "ethical responsibility" profile ready-made -- yours probably does too. If we each leaned a little bit, the world would move.

I am making the same offer with this that I did with An Inconvenient Truth. If you're interested in reading or listening to Giving, leave me a comment and email me your address and I will have it sent to you in your format of choice (audio or print). All you have to do is pick one of the charities in it, kick them $10 or $20, and post about which one you donated to and why. Offered to the first to reply with interest. If you don't find it amazing, I'll buy the donation back from you.

The book is honestly full of hope. It really will make you feel better about the world. One of the complicated aspects about the internet and the "information age" is that it can be difficult to sort through it all, to get an algorithm that gets you the right information in the right dose at the right time. This is the right information. This is the stuff we ought to be thinking about. Give Britney Spears a break and invest in something good for the world.

The more I work in the areas where I work (which frequently feel more like play, and the more they feel like play, the better the results I tend to get), the more I think that my entire profession, or series of professions, can be distilled into a single concept of the science of choice.

Games are about choices. They fundamentally are about choice and consequence, which is a variation away from Jim Gee's codification of the game experience as the scientific method. What is interesting and, to me, justifies that variation is that players are not purely objective oriented. They truly delight in finding ways to get bizarre results out of an intentionally predictable interface, and this becomes a form of self expression. We have handles, in terms of our online identities, for a reason beyond their simple utility. Providing environments promoting choice results in increased player loyalty, faster spread of viral material, and a generally happier player base.

Marketing is about choices. The number one thing you cannot do without resorting to dishonesty (which inevitably backfires) is market a poor product. Trace patterns in people who have had exceptionally strong careers in marketing and you will generally see a high level of skill in selecting what they market. Viral marketing is about setting up an environment where your prospective buyer can make a choice and feel good and rewarded for making that choice. Facebook, one of the most powerful recent marketing and social networking tools, is inherently leveraging choice in a way that MySpace failed to accomplish.

Writing is about as choice-driven as anything I can think of, not just in terms of the above scenarios where you are predicting or attempting to influence choice, or the ways in which choice plays a role in everything in life, but storytelling fundamentally also comes down to choice (and, again, consequence). Storytelling is, in general, another broad metaphor, if you incorporate interactivity.

The further we get from having to expend all of our energy to ensure our basic survival, the more we value choice. Free will becomes of value when you are equally safe making decisions on your own as you are placing your fate in the hands of a dictator (one who is stronger than you and will ensure your basic physical protection). This is largely why we are seeing an explosion of choice-as-personal-expression, from online avatars to personal websites and blogs to downloadable single-unit portions of music. There are entire services now, like Second Life, which on a basic level exist only to allow you to make choices. They don't even bother to throw much of anything else into the mix.

AnthologyBuilder has been making the rounds on various journals, though I heard it first from Matt Rotundo. I talked about something like this in my many maunderings on new speculative fiction models, so I'm tickled that something like it (which must surely have been long in development then) now actually exists. It has interesting implications, including potential undervaluing of future collections compiled by the author, which is reason for caution, but overall it's a terrific thing, the iTunes of fiction.

There's been an evolution in game design over the last decade emphasizing choice and player expression. It's taken the industry this long to come fully to terms with the fact that maximizing player decision-making isn't a bad thing. Some guidance is still needed, which is what will differentiate a world like SecondLife from an actual game -- but you would be amazed at the reticence of game designers to put choice in the player's hands, even in something as inherently social, expressive, and commercial as an MMO. Games like A Tale in the Desert take this to new heights in experimentation (and there is no question that designing for choice is an expensive process), but overall for some time now the industry has been waking up to the value of allowing the player to make simple, even completely meaningless, choices, and rewarding them for it.

This is venturing on a lot of words over something that appears to be an obvious realization, but the concept of choice is as fundamental as the concept of freedom, and it is equally overlooked in so many enterprises. Choice is good. Choice is fun. Choice is what life is about. In a world where we have a profusion of information and manipulatable media, the differentiating factor is how we navigate that media, which comes down to identity, which comes down to choice. It amazes me how much StumbleUpon can multiply your web traffic, and this, too, is choice and identity based, leveraging word of mouth and encouraging users for finding cool stuff on the internet. In any undertaking where your objective is to reach more people (in depth or in breadth), I can think of few ways in which adding an element of choice wouldn't drastically improve your reach and the resonance of your effort. And I do think that all art ultimately becomes interactive, or it becomes extinct.

Writing is a hard gig. So much of it is tied to negativity: rejections, near misses, limited successes, a pay rate that hasn’t changed since the pulp days. Generally, publication is the greatest measure of success. And rightly so. But looking at publications at professional and respected markets as the only measure of success can be hazardous (note that I said “only measure” of success). I’ve been working at this craft for just shy of a decade and my average for stories published per year has not increased since I started, though I now publish in better paying pro and semi-pro markets. In almost any other field, this ratio of input to successful output would be a sign of failure: over one hundred and fifty rejections to one story sold in a year.

But the world of art ain’t fair. We know this. So using that equation as a fair measure of ones ability can lead you toward bastardized thinking about your efforts. Buying your stories is out of your control: that’s an editor’s job. All we can do is write more stories to have more chances at sales, and make them better stories so that they have a better chance. Stories can be rejected for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with quality (but for god sake do not ignore the advice of editors when they give it to you!). So, as I keep pounding the keys and working to make each successive story better than the last, I like to remind myself that the war of art is a two-front war. There is the Bad News Front, filled with rejection, bad luck, and the unfair nature of the beast. There is also The Good News Front, aspects of your efforts that remind you of the value of your conduct in this battle. If you only see the Bad News Front, you’re missing the full spectrum of conflict here. For me, the Good News Front includes:

1. Positive feedback from editors: I’ve noticed that most of the rejections I get now also include encouraging words from editors about some aspect of my story. So while I work on my limitations I am also aware of my capabilities.

2. Stories still being considered for purchase: I have two stories on an editor’s desk at a pro rate magazine. No final decision has been made yet. But, it shows I’m still playing in the big league, even if I am an underdog.

3. Selling non-fiction that relates to writing: I’ve enjoyed some success with selling a short informal history of writing workshops in the 20th century, conducting an interview with my favorite contemporary author Gary Braunbeck, and my recent piece on pro wrestling as a form of fantasy. Each has earned me cash, kudos, and helped me make contacts with people I respect in the genre world. This helps build professional credibility, which is also a goal of mine.

4. Story Production: Since December 2006, I’ve completed thirty-four stories. Twenty are in various stages of being revised or thrown out, but that’s roughly two stories a month. Damn. Looking at these numbers helps remind me of my dedication to my craft and proves I’m not as lazy as I sometimes think I am.

5. Story Experimentation: Along with my comrade in arms Justin, I attempted to write a story a week for three months (helping to explain a lot of the above output). I wrote tons of stuff outside my comfort zone: pulp SF, mimetic sad stories, fantasy/alternative history, YA, experimental POVs, stories without dialogue. Some were awful, some need plenty of revision, and some were among the best things I have yet written. I also wrote fourteen vignettes to music this past week which was a real creative headtrip for me. Stretching my repertoire is also a sign of commitment to the craft.

6. Story Revision: Revisions can be brutal depending on how you look at them. If you only see them as an exercise in exorcising all the flaws of your draft, as a collection of your failings as a writer, then revisions feel like hell. I try to balance this with the mindframe that I am trying to make this the best story possible, of using my skills at a different stage of writing to bring out the best there is from the first draft and get rid of the junk. In short, I’m hunting for diamonds amidst the coal, and though I might get dirty I am still finding MY diamonds.

7. Story Release: Those fourteen stories sent to the market represent 38% of all the stories I have out there. Damn. That’s pretty good for one year. I think my previous year’s effort was maybe six stories. While I certainly agree you have to make the story the best it can be (see above), unless you release them into the cultural marketplace you are missing an important step in becoming a pro. Unless I dislike the story, I keep it in circulation, finding it a home no matter what. I sold a story this year that had 21 rejections over five years before it found a home. Perseverance is critical, as that example showed.

8. Rejection Reflection: When rejections do get me down, I look at my rejection file and see all the markets that have turned to dust while my career marches on. Again, perseverance is critical.

9. Finding niche markets: Ralan and Duotrope are invaluable resources for finding markets, but I’ve also found many on my own. I sold a serialized short story during Halloween to the local paper in Kingston that earned me $500.00. I’ve queried magazines that have similar subject matter to my stories and created opportunities for publication that otherwise would not exist. Whenever I think I can’t find a new market for a story that’s been kicked in the face over ten times, I surprise myself by discovering one off the beaten track and create another possibility for publication

10. Story Reflection: I’ve received a few reviews over the years, mostly positive and some very cool. I don’t look at them much, but they offer a reminder when the rejections for the year are entering the three digit range that, yup, I got talent and know how to use it and, gosh darn it, some people like my work.

Publication is just one part of the war. Think of it as the decisive moment of battle, where victory comes to fruition. The key to that victory is in the story you wrote, but supporting its final thrust are all the component pieces of the Good News Front, holding up against the rejections and injustices (perceived and real) of the battlefield so that, in the end, your perseverance pays off.

Huzzah.

JSR

Hey all you bibliophiles -- my fellow '05 Odyssey grad devilwrites is running a Pyr Books giveaway over at her journal. Check out her three posts on the Pyr rundown to get an idea what each is about.

I very coincidentally only recently became aware of Pyr distinctly -- I knew of them in a vague sense, but had become more aware after talking to Lou Anders about his Live Without a Net collection following my Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine post (the wiki for which is doing quite well!). Shara is completely right about the quality of the cover artwork -- they're beautiful and I love the visual style -- and I can only speak for Live Without a Net, which is an older collection, but there really is some fantastic must-read fiction in here. This is sci-fi like I've wished it could be; sci-fi you'd read even if you don't read sci-fi. So check it out and win a free book!

Now off to the mailbox...

Or "Let's give 'em something to talk about".

It's lately been in vogue to trash World of Warcraft, and it's no new thing that something popular should be heavily criticized. When you reach a certain level of visibility you draw fire from people who like to rage against The Man and from people who don't dig the trend and therefore get irritated by being reminded of it. Similarly, WoW has been talked to death and it becomes difficult to put forth any analysis on something so heavily discussed. But I think there are still important things to talk about vis WoW's insane success (and when a single game gets big enough to buy Activision, it is insanely successful), and it also reflects on the successes of major popular fiction titles as well.

Something that WoW did almost by accident -- and I do think it was by accident because nothing in their engineering supports this specifically -- was create a social context. Raiding parties do this naturally, but WoW did it particularly well. It actually brought people together, friends that I know who hadn't talked to each other in years, who are suddenly now talking every day and engaging in a virtual environment. It strengthened old friendships and forged new ones. Online games have a history of connecting strangers, but WoW, unlike its predecessors, connected people who already knew each other, gave friends something to talk about and something to do together -- questing in WoW became as much a staple as going out to a movie or restaurant. And for the interconnected but geographically separated populations now currently bridged by technology, that became even more important.

It did this for strangers, people applying for jobs, people in waiting rooms. WoW got so big that you could mention playing it in some non-game-context social environment and stand a good chance of someone, rather than looking at you like you were a space alien, asking what server you played on, what profession, and BAM, off you go into a detailed, often impassioned conversation with a total stranger.

This is part of a core purpose of entertainment media that isn't frequently discussed. The form that did this so pervasively that it's now a cliche ("So how 'bout them Padres?") was baseball. I heard a story on NPR some weeks ago, a retrospective on the removal of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and how, in Brooklyn, it utterly removed a social context from the streets of New York -- literally made the city a more unfriendly place.

And now MMOs are filling this purpose. But fiction did it too -- Harry Potter operates on a similar level, and actually for similar reasons. Jordan's Wheel of Time would have done something similar had it ever really broken out into the mainstream, which it nearly did, but not anywhere close to Rowling's achievement.

What all of these have in common -- and I have to waive the bias flag here just by disclaimer, in case you missed its obvious presence in my worldview -- are game mechanics. They vary in things like their specificity of discussion -- WoW discussions tend to be strategic or exploratory while Harry Potter discussions are mostly speculative, trying to guess a plot's next movement (and therefore, I think, HP discussions are more limited) -- but the connecting element between these hugely popular epic works is the very mechanical way that a viewer of the media is able to connect with the work. When we read, I believe we are subconsciously -- or often consciously -- slotting ourselves into the world. It is part of the immersion. And so if there is an easy character class for us to identify with, we have a hook of fascination that makes that immersion much more vivid. Games do this overtly, asking you to choose your poison right from the beginning -- books are a little more subtle, though Wheel of Time certainly was about as subtle as a brick to the head with its character classes. Harry Potter was a bit moreso with its wands and various subtle breeds of wizards, though they all studied in the same place. The most overt class-generation there was in the House structure at Hogwarts. But it is certainly no coincidence that there was a huge flurry of marketing attention devoted to the concept of "What House would You Belong To?" It encourages the fantasy.

In essence when you are socially connecting via or over one of these media, you are expressing your personality. Personal expression is key in any kind of social gaming (and any personal interaction can be termed social gaming on some level). When I'm talking about speccing out my Hunter and what kind of pet I want to go after once I hit level 40, I am really talking about personal expression, elements of my personality that are not easily conveyed but take symbolic form in these game mechanics. Likewise for a kid who says they are certainly Ravenclaw and could never be anything else in the Harry Potter universe.

What this means in terms of world-building, for any media, is that completeness is important. Properties that have fallen short of the mega mark, but otherwise had that kind of potential, often lack completeness, something that they could have arrived at through theories applied in video game mechanic balancing. The D&D character class structure is a symbolic and evocative version of the same thing Myers-Brigg were trying to do with their type indicator -- and if you go through and make sure that you have a character class for each personality type (and I'm not saying you should use Myers-Brigg -- they're not nearly creative enough, though it would be interesting to see someone try), you're that much more likely not to lose parts of your audience by not giving them a place to slot themselves in the world. In Wheel of Time, if you were female, you were basically Aes Sedai, royalty, or boring -- and I would bet that was a partial audience turnoff.

In essence, I believe the principles applied in game design to generating a complete player experience -- which at its core is a meta-layer, a fictional world that is whole and satisfying, a full layer on the real world in which we exist that you then push one degree farther to see what happens -- can be applied to any fictional work. And the great thing is that when you engage in this kind of elegance-focused worldbuilding (I say 'elegance' because that, in a computing sense, is what you are attempting to achieve when balancing character classes -- you need to be complete without going overboard and having so many choices that the reader can't connect), you're also creating a more realistic world, because you are taking into account elements of fantasy not just sprung from your own mind, but ones that you might never consider a reader (or player) wanting to experience.

Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write…. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think.
Kelly Link, Locus, Nov. 2007

This quotation, from award-winning author Kelly Link, immediately caught my eye because I work the same way.

My writing process is extremely lengthy. I usually spend 4-6 weeks outlining a short story, including the world, the plot, the characters and their arcs. During semesters when I’m not teaching, that’s 4-6 weeks of working all day, so that’s 20-30 days of outlining, before I write a single sentence.

A lot of that time is spent just sitting in a chair thinking about things–characters, the opening, plot points, the flavor of the world. Sometimes I’ll look up at the end of the day and realize I only have one page of new notes from that day–one page for 8 hours of work! But thinking through things this way is invaluable for me. It helps me spot inconsistencies or logic gaps before I’ve wasted time writing them. I think it also helps spontaneous ideas bubble to the surface. I was struggling for an ending to a piece recently; then I suddenly wondered, what if the character had his face melted off? It turned out to be perfect for that story. This pondering seems the same thing that Kelly means by “boredom.” For me it’s not ennui or anything; just that state of “stillness,” as she calls it, while I think through all these components of the story.

As she also mentions, I too find doing other things to be a great “recharger.” I build furniture and electric guitars, so I spend lots of time doing detailed woodwork. My workshop has no clock–each task takes as long as it takes, and it’s done when the results are acheived. It’s relaxing because it’s manual work rather than mental. The work is also done only for me, not for commission or for some editor to arbitrarily judge. I find all of those differences very refreshing. Sometimes when the weather is nice, I’ll take 2-3 or even 4 days off from writing and work on a guitar.

From Kelly’s quotation, it sounds like she works a similar way. I spoke to her at ReaderCon a few years ago. Her fiction isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I respect that she’s established herself while writing in a new subgenre of fantasy, so she really had to establish both that and herself at the same time. I also love that she’s giving back to the field in general and to that new subgenre with her small press, publishing books and a magazine. So it was rather cool to find out that she works the same languid way that I do, by embracing the boredom as the silence before the creative storm.

You should all go and check out Jay Ridler’s newly minted article at Clarkesworld, “Steel Chair through the Looking Glass:
The Fractured Fantasy World of Professional Wrestling”. It is, as usual, very thoroughly researched and presents a unique viewpoint on the origins of fantasy in our modern collective consciousness. You can read more about Jay’s wrestling theory, if you’re so inclined, at his post here on Homeless Moon, “Fan of a Hitman”.

Also thanks and proverbial props to Lynda Rucker, Odfellow extraordinaire, for linking us over at her blog, which we all also read and enjoy for her thoughts on writing. You can also check out her story “Ash-Mouth” in Black Static 2, where she appears with another favorite author of ours, Steve Rasnic Tem. Steve and Melanie Tem were our writers-in-residence for Odyssey 2005 and write very remarkable, largely underrated fiction — they’re the stealthy veteran ninjas of the specfic world. They were also terrific instructors and wonderful people to work with.

I’m still musing over the relation, if any, of punk rock and writing fiction. I know my previous discussion of The Replacements’ may have seemed strange in this context, so here are some more thoughts.

Writing and music are very different art forms. Music has a live performance angle, it has a group dynamic, it has abstraction in the use of sound that is very different then words on a page. As noted earlier, you can’t be too punk rock in writing because, as they say, writing has to make sense (does John Zorn? The Fall?). Can you, as punk rock does, break the rules of grammar and syntax and expect to have anyone accept you? Hey, Ho, Hell No! At least not in the final draft.

So where does a punk rock spirit exist in the writing world? Attitude and subject matter for sure (Bukowski and Crews come to mind), but I think the heart of a punk rock ethos in writing is in how you approach drafting stories. Not the final draft. Think of that as they demo tape, where you cleaned up the vocals a bit and doubled up the guitar tracks to make things thicker than your dime-store imitation Les Paul and five watt shitkicker amp could handle. (I miss my shitkicker amp, not very loud but it had the kind of distortion that would have made Link Wray and Husker Du proud).

That first draft can be very punk rock. Just gun it. Try something new. Who gives a rat’s ass, no one is watching you anyway, so go for the throat and kick out the jams. Brainstorming can be punk rock: cranking out different ideas than you normally would, stranger stuff than your normal meat and potatoes. Experimenting in form, content and genre can be really punk rock: give a western a whirl, a crime tale a shot, a horror story a stab, a fantasy a chance, a space opera a crack. This really reminds of the ‘Mats, who would occasionally do an all rockabilly set or do covers of Black Sabbath endlessly or switch instruments to create some fresh danger (and their version of Hey Good-lookin’ is a bona-fide classic with one of the WORST guitar solos of all time, yet it makes me smile every time I hear it).

Risking something different in the face of the status quo (including your own) is very punk rock. I tried some of that this week. I did free-writing to an acoustic CD my lady bought me. Just wrote whatever came into my head as the song filled the space. The results weren’t stories, but little vignettes that could be stories. The coolest thing about it was that while the content of the these sketches and images were 100% my voice, the form they took was miles away from any of the stories that I was planning on writing. These vignettes were coming from somewhere else, as if I’d found a trapdoor to new material that was strange yet familiar at the same time.

Some of them were bad. Others really neat. Others average. Some feel like flash fiction, others snippets from novels, and some short stories. Others are just vignettes. But in an hour I generated fourteen possibilities that would have never, ever crossed my brain unless I got out of my skin and tried a new approach, took a risk going somewhere new instead of pounding the same old pavement. And yet, they still feel like my kinda stories.

Now that, boyos, is punk rock.

JSR