We're sliding into the holidays, and there is prettiness to share! Behold, Dehong's latest lovely creation:


(Click the image to open a larger version.)

You can now preorder Lance of Earth and Sky on Amazon also. :)

It's truly an honor to have another cover from Dehong. I understand he's been very busy with Time Voyager (and their MMO coincidentally titled Chaos Gate!), so it's especially fortunate that he was able to make some time for Andovar. :)

Also, you can now pick up Clockwork Phoenix on Kindle for $3.99! The anthology was critically acclaimed and has some great stories in it from Laird Barron, Leah Bobet, Michael J. DeLuca, and others -- including my fableish thing "Root and Vein", which got a nice call out from this recent review at Dark Cargo.

Reviews continue to come in for Sword of Fire and Sea and I have been inexcusably lax in getting them all compiled onto my website. But That Bookish Girl says "Sword of Fire and Sea by Erin Hoffman was an incredibly exciting and compelling read." -- and SFFWorld.com weighs in on gryphons and more: "Through her characters, Hoffman imbues the Gryphons with a true sense of awe, and an initial feeling of them being the Other."

I hope you are all winding toward a great holiday season, and an even better 2012.

Ah, November. Football, a crisp chill in the air, piles of fallen leaves.  And National Novel-Writing Month–”NaNoWriMo”–that amateur-novelist love-fest that always makes me shake my head.

I’m fine with any motivation structure that gets butt in chair to write. And plenty of ‘learned’ or ‘informed’ amateur writers use “NaNoWriMo” to do writing they would be doing anyway. But “NanoWriMo” seems to extend beyond that into a deluge of deluded hobbyists.

There’s nothing wrong with a hobby. I build electric guitars. They don’t come out perfect, and I don’t mind. But I would never claim that my hobby-level work deserves to be paid for or could compete with the work of pro luthiers.

Something about fiction writing seems to attract amateurs. Unlike most hobbies, where you can’t even try them out without having some specialized learning or equipment, many amateur novelists somehow think that anyone who’s had an English class can write a novel. That there’s no need to study or learn. And that their novels, written without any training or insight, will deserve to be bought or to share the shelves with pro authors.

Laura Miller on salon.com last year offers the take of a reader. She’s not a fiction writer and so doesn’t understand the value of butt-in-chair. But she does see through the hoopla of “NaNoWriMo” to the patheticness of deluded hobbyists and the hypocrisy that they’re not reading.

I agree, especially about the reading. To that I’ll add the hypocrisy that they’re not studying writing or trying to learn something about it.

I echo her wish for hobbyist novelists to read instead of trying to write. For those who insist on trying to write, read a good how-to-write book first. Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends is one of the best.

So if not a National Novel-Reading Month, then maybe at least every October could be ‘national read a writing book’ month.

I had a great time at Capclave, a couple weekends ago.  (Except for the con-crud that delayed my postlude…)

Highlights included moderating a small press panel with Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, and Mike Walsh of Old Earth Books. Meeting BCS authors Adam Corbin Fusco and David Milstein; hanging out with Jen and Melissa. Chatting again with BCS author and novelist Genevieve Valentine. Seeing co-GOH Cat Valente again (I met her last year at World Fantasy, when the BCS party woke her up at 2 AM :) ).

Speaking with James Morrow, who lectured my year at Odyssey. His novel about Darwin’s lady assistant flying a steampunk airship over the Amazon, which he read from at ReaderCon 2010, is in rewrites and hasn’t yet found a publisher. Which is sad because the excerpt was great. He really liked the cool BCS flyers I had.

Chatting in the bar for hours with co-GOH Carrie Vaughn, a fellow Odyssey grad and bestseller who I had never met in person.  She is mostly known for her urban fantasy, but she’s read tons of epic fantasy and published several dozen short stories, and knows a ton about the field.

The Terry Pratchett surprise visit. I’m not familiar with his work, but I know he’s a very clever and engaging guy. The excerpts that his assistant read from his new book were quite droll (although the assistant read for way too long and interjected his own opinions too often).

They only made enough time to take one question, and it wasn’t about his books but about a BBC documentary he had helped make on assisted suicide for terminally ill. He talked for twenty minutes about that, made even more profound because of his own health situation, and it was utterly fascinating. (I will be blogging about that specifically later.)  Someone in the crowd put it on youtube, and Capclave posted an mp3 of the audio.

The GOH interview. I didn’t know how they would do it with two GOHs. It turned out that Carrie and Cat know each other, so they interviewed each other and took pre-written audience questions.  It was the best GOH interview I’ve ever seen. They were engaging, witty, and profound. Topics included the sociological underpinnings of the mythoses of vampires and werewolves; writing for shared-world anthologies; writing goals and achieving them; where they live and the sense of place in their writing.

I was only at the con for a day and a half, but I had a great time seeing these cool people and having great conversations. That seems to be what I mostly get out of cons–talking to clever people about interesting things.  I’ll definitely be back next year.

Poking my head in here since it looks like Goodreads has approved my giveaway -- must have missed the email!

On Halloween entries will close, so get it while it's hot! Three copies up for grabs.

More news... soon. :) The game is afoot! Also, in Andovar news, this past week I received the countersigned contract for Shield of Sea and Space, which means: IT'S A TRILOGY!!! Lance of Earth and Sky comes out April 2012, and I turn in Shield in June.

But I know you're really here for giveaway details. Let's see if this works!

This weekend I will be at Capclave, the local D.C.-area SF/F con.

The co-Guest of Honor this year is bestselling writer Carrie Vaughn, a fellow Odyssey grad.  I’ve heard her writing lectures in podcasts (they’re very insightful), but I’ve never met her in person.

The con again this year has lots of cool literary SF/F programming.  I will be on several panels, again this year:

Friday 8:00 pm:
Short Fiction: Where is the new good short fiction found now?

Saturday 11:00 am:
Small Press Publishing: Running a publishing company, publishing a magazine or semi-prozine.

Saturday 1:00 pm:
When Characters Threaten to Take Over

Alas, no reading this year, for some reason–I did ask for one.

I will probably swing by the hotel bar Friday after my panel, at 9PM.  I’m not sure how long I’ll be around Saturday, and I probably won’t be there Sunday.  If you see me, feel free to grab a snazzy BCS flyer and say hello.

A recent article on Salon.com laments that more and more aspiring writers don’t read much.

Reading has always been viewed as an essential activity for writers, whether for priming the creative pump, checking out other authors’ technique, researching the field, or reading for fun.  (Which of course is how all writers started out.)

Writers who don’t read can end up with huge knowledge gaps in any of the above, which often show through in their work.  My favorite is the infamous case of an epic fantasy novelist who had only ever read one fantasy novel before writing his own (and a third-generation one at that: Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth).  It was a classic case of the reader thinking (as the Salon article puts it) “If this guy can do it, so can I!”  The (epically awful) results speak for themselves.

Alas, I’m as guilty of not-reading as anyone.  I do read magazine subs for hours every day, which makes me think a bit about writing and technique, but that’s not the same.  I blame it on not having much time, which is always a lame excuse, and on being very hard to impress.

But over the summer I started my reread of George R.R. Martin’s Ice and Fire books, in preparation for the new one.  I’m enjoying them all over again, and I’m getting a lot of new insight.  I’ve always admired his stuff, and I have kept current on his short fiction.  Maybe it’s that I’m reading slower this time or I know more about writing than when they first came out, or I’m thinking more about novels lately, but I’m seeing lots of very cool story things and writing things.

So maybe this will get me back on the reading wagon.  At least, until I finish all 5,500 pages of GRRM. :)

It's been awhile since I last wrote for the Escapist, so I'm glad it appears I haven't forgotten how to do it. "1988: the Golden Age of Game Piracy", went live today. Many thanks to Paul Reiche for providing insights; in addition to his actual quotes, his perspective pivoted the article away from a first draft that had a rather different tone.

I had intended to post about the article with some "bonus features" in the form of a section that was ultimately removed (rightfully) for being too academic. Maybe I'll post that another time, since I'd really like to know whether I was properly applying some economic theory.

But instead I'd like to draw your attention to this post from Russ Pitts, "Goodbye is Still Goodbye".

As you might gather, Russ is moving on from the magazine, and while I've worked with a great number of wonderful folk in the last five years, I don't think any of them would disagree that Russ's departure in particular marks the end of an era.

My first article for the Escapist back in 2006 was a rather impetuous call to arms for the modern game industry, when the E was quite a different place. It had almost none of its current features and was instead "purely" focused on what would become its "feature" articles; there was a beautiful graphic cover and full spread art for each feature. Even then, in the magazine's youth, I thought it was a tremendous honor to write for them, and over the years I do believe they remained the best and most thoughtful source of game journalism in the US. They aimed to set a standard of excellence, and Russ was a big part of that success.

Joe Blancato and Jon Martin (both also by now departed) made my introduction to the magazine, but Russ was the consistent editorial steady hand on the wheel throughout -- even, interestingly, when he'd moved on to fresher pastures to grow the magazine's new video content. Where many game magazines have a very well-intentioned but limited tunnel vision view of the industry and the market, Russ had a worldliness that gave the magazine breadth and, I think, greater relevance. He published some tremendous stuff, and as the magazine grew and changed -- even when it transitioned away from some of the thoughtfulness and cultural forward-thinking that had first earned it my loyalty as a reader and a writer -- I always respected his ability to ride the leading edge of a wave that made new careers even as it destroyed many others.

So, as Leah would say, tip your hat, folks; the times they are a-changin'. There is little doubt that the Escapist will remain a powerhouse in game media for many years to come, and even less doubt that Russ will go on to even greater adventures. But among other things, Inside Job, the quality of life column I wrote from 2007-2008, wouldn't have existed without him, nor, I'm sure, would many of my feature articles. I am a better writer as a result, and I will always think back on the production of each -- even when edits and deadlines plus a "real" job resulted in all-nighter catatonia -- with great fondness.

You can keep up with Russ's rather strange blog here, and peruse records of his own odd internet notoriety.

My Homeless Moon cohort Justin Howe had a neat writing post last week about openings.  Justin is a first-reader for a Hugo-award winning magazine, so he has seen a ton of story openings, and he’s written a few cool ones himself.

In his post, he articulates the way he thinks writers in openings establish that “trust” with the reader.  He calls it “control.”  For example, not trying to do too much into the opening; not cramming in lots of introspection or backstory or setting.

That’s a neat way to articulate it.  I often call it the prose feeling “assured.”  As a reader you can tell, in a great opening, that you’re in expert hands.  Like the writer knows exactly where they want to lead you.  What things they need to lay out for you in order to have you follow them there, with nothing that’s unnecessary or extra.

Thinking about “control” or “assured-ness” in openings reminded me of a nugget I read a while back.  It’s via Bradley P. Beaulieu, a new fantasy novelist with a dozen pro story sales, who’s also written some neat articles on writing in the SFWA Bulletin.

He went to Clarion years ago and, in his awesome post of nuggets from the whole six weeks of the workshop, related this one from veteran writer Nancy Kress (whose books on writing I love):

It’s more important to be interesting at the beginning of a story than clear. The common tendency at the beginning of a story is to over-explain so that the reader “understands.”

Well, the reader doesn’t really care about understanding early on. They care about an interesting character in an interesting situation, something to entertain them and make them want to read on, and that’s almost always not the same as explaining to the Nth detail what’s going on and what came before.

That’s a slightly different angle on it than Justin’s “control,” but it’s talking about the same end. It’s a notch beyond the common writerly advice of honing the purpose of every thing you put in an opening. It’s honing your overall bundle of purposes there.

It’s sticking to the bare minimum of purposes to be achieved in your opening. Having them be enough that the opening should be interesting.  But exercising control as far as which purposes you plan to achieve in the opening and which you set aside to accomplish later in the story.

Having that sort of metered approach to the set of things you’re trying to accomplish in the opening also means you probably won’t have too much background/etc or be over-explaining.

Insightful food for writerly thought the next time you craft an opening.

Weird Tales magazine has been sold, according to Editor Ann VanderMeer, to a new Publisher/Editor, Marvin Kaye, who intends to edit the magazine himself.  Ms. VanderMeer’s editorship will end with the next issue, #359, which Mr. Kaye plans to publish next February.

I for one will be sorry to see Ms. VanderMeer go. Her editorial vision took WT in a less pulp, more literary and character-centered direction. She published several pieces by veteran writers that I enjoyed, including a new Elric novella by Michael Moorcock.  And she also published many new and neo-pro writers, as she proudly mentions in her farewell editorial, including Rachel Swirsky, Jonathan Wood, Amanda Downum, and N.K. Jemisin.

The former and the latter have gone on to earn Finalists for major awards.  Jonathan Wood has authored two of my favorite stories so far in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Amanda Downum has published a dark, secondary-world fantasy trilogy.

Ms. VanderMeer also bought my first genre sale, “Excision” in WT #347. (That same issue included the Jonathan Wood and Amanda Downum pieces.  Downum’s story is one of the top ten stories I’ve read in the last decade–a creepy yet heart-rending tale of emotional loss and attempted redemption.)  And Ann was delightful to me in person at Capclave last year.

Best of luck to Mr. Kaye with his new plans for the magazine, and I’m certain that Ms. VanderMeer’s editorial vision will continue in her future projects.  But I’m sad to see the new slant that she brought to WT five years ago end.

I’m not a fan of writing posts, especially those written by unpublished, self-published, and/or “neo-pro” writers. Nor am I fan of “celebrity slushreaders” going on about how they dream a story they select might win a Nebula like they were right there writing the story beside the author, or at the very least keeping their tea mug filled, as if reading slush wasn’t the equivalent of being so much human baleen.

Bullshit on all that.

But I’ve got two writing posts itching to get off my fingers so let me just get them done between now and next week and then I won’t have to write about writing or slushing for the rest of the year. I’m putting it here for my own benefit as much as anyone else.

People talk a lot about hooks and openings and grabbing the reader so they keep on reading. And yeah I use the word hook as well, but it’s not about that at all. (Rudy Rucker has a great bit on “hooks” in his Writer’s Toolkit, which everyone should download.)

Other folks talk about establishing trust between reader and writer, and I agree with them but wondered how that trust was gained because it has to be right at the start. Then I got a couple stories in the slush this week that helped me figure it out.

What it comes down to is control.

You can do whatever you want in your story. Write it lush or transparent. Climb Freytag’s pyramid or flip it on its peak and kick it in the rear. Anything goes as long as you’re in control.

As long as each word and sentence connects to the next word and sentence and the whole thing makes a pattern where there’s nothing more you can subtract from it. That’s control. Having pieces left in your hand at the end is control.

What’s not control is starting your story with a well-groomed hook and then piling on introspection, backstory, and/or setting details. What’s not control is leaving nothing out, but throwing it all in there and hoping for the best. Lush doesn’t mean overgrown or overwriting a story so thick it collapses under its own weight.

Every word must link together. They can be ugly or oddly shaped words, but they have to fit into the story’s overall pattern (and of course that pattern can be all freak-a-deak weird, but there has to be some discernable resonance there).

That’s it. Writing post number one is done. It’s all about control.

Next week 10 Bad Slush Habits. Until then here’s Spoek Mathambo’s disturbing cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control”. Don’t blame me if it gives you nightmares.