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Messages - Cyclone Jack

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16
Author Craft / Re: Short Story Publication
« on: March 01, 2008, 06:39:19 AM »
Quote from: meg_evonne on February 29, 2008, 03:29:35 PM
wooozooo   Haven't seen CJ for a long time or have we just not been crossing threads! Welcome back!

Heya M_E!

Last October I took off on walkabout, something I generally do at least once every other year (sometimes more often) as a way to keep from becoming bogged down in any one place. Traveling on 'The Raggedy Edge' (to steal a Firefly phrase) is the best way I know to obtain writing material and the mindset to use it. I also like to get away from the 'Net and its inbuilt InfoOverload for a while. :)

I'm back for the forseeable future, though.

17
Author Craft / Re: Short Story Publication
« on: February 29, 2008, 09:51:05 AM »
Aberrant Dreams actively pursues SF/fantasy with a horrific edge. 3 cents per word and a contributor's copy of their yearly anthology.

Dark Energy "We're looking for wild stories that cross genres." $20 flat fee.

Good luck! :)

18
Author Craft / Re: Critique Circle Online Workshop
« on: October 05, 2007, 01:31:51 AM »
Suilan --

Yep, workshops aren't the be-all and end all of polishing craft. No resource is as important in that regard as simple, old fashioned practice.

'Show, don't tell!' is, to me, the most annoying canard tossed out during a critique/review. Mainly because people seem to think it's some sort of Immutable Law Of Proper Writing. I've seen people pull it out while critiquing an epistolatory story! I wondered if they thought they were responding to the fictional letter writer. :D

It also ignores how well a writer 'tells'. R.A. Lafferty was an honest-to-God master of the short story and he 'told' almost exclusively.

19
Author Craft / Re: Critique Circle Online Workshop
« on: October 03, 2007, 05:23:59 AM »

Unpolished, weak stories are ideal for critique purposes. The more you can diagnose wrong with the work, the better. The process of critiquing is about developing a critical eye, learning how to spot those mistakes in your own writing as you make them.

And remember -- even once published, the people who read your stories are not going to be talented writers, but readers. If a writer -- one you consider talented or not -- finds passages, ideas, etc. unclear, vauge, contradictory then rest assured that readers will as well.

And editors will sure as hell notice those things. ;)

As to 'safety' -- if you're worried about plagarism, look at it this way. Placing a story online gives you a copyright by fait accompli. Not only that, but the server timestamps and dates your work. If it is plagarized, you have proof -- not only of prior ownership, but of every single computer to view that work. Excellent evidence for everyone from webmasters to editors to courts of law. :)


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Author Craft / Re: Who's going to participate in NANO this year?
« on: October 03, 2007, 05:14:52 AM »
Quote from: Simon Hogwood on October 03, 2007, 04:36:04 AM
Show-off.  ;)

I didn't say it was 50-60k of good writing. :P

Seriously...I stick to a 2000 word per day quota. On the best of these days, it's 2k (or more) of directed, fairly polished narrative. On the worst it's blathering nonsense. Mostly it's part warm up, part salvagable prose, and part meandering.

If a writer is serious, this is the way to go. If you are stuck for time, make the quota lower. I generally get my 2k out in 2-3 hours.


21
Author Craft / Re: Who's going to participate in NANO this year?
« on: October 03, 2007, 04:14:01 AM »

I write 50-60k every month.


22
Author Craft / Critique Circle Online Workshop
« on: September 30, 2007, 09:06:24 PM »
Critique Circle

One of the best critique/workshop sites I've yet encountered. Lots of members, fairly short waiting time for story submission, interesting point system to ensure fairness in critiquing, and some of the most ingenious formatting systems I've ever seen. The software actually lets you create WYSIWYG inline critiques on the fly as you read. Very clever! :D

The entire setup is designed to protect your first publishing rights.

There's also an active forum and I've found the people there to be dedicated and  friendly. What's more, the site also boasts a host of writing help tools (character templates, outlining program, etc.) and a nice database of links and articles on writing, editing and selling your work.

23
Author Craft / Re: Are Vamps and Werewolves too overdone?
« on: September 25, 2007, 07:24:08 PM »
Quote from: mslinsenmayer on September 25, 2007, 07:16:25 PM
A couple of yers agao I came up with a 'is it a vampire test' for Ad&d.. went kinda like this..


Does:
 He/She speak french?

Wear Black?

Have hair impossibly long?

Obviously Bisexual?

Sigh with angst on uneccacary occasions?

Cant tell if he/she is a he/she or it? Double points for answer c: all of the above.

In a modern setting, have ridulous ammounts of firearms, or know someone who does?

Are they related to a well known historical figure?





LOL!

Speaking of Lamia and AD&D, a Lamia stomped a mudhole in my party while I was playing Troika's CRPG adaption of The Temple Of Elemental Evil. Beautiful game, but buggier'n a rural Florida trailer park.

24
Author Craft / Re: Are Vamps and Werewolves too overdone?
« on: September 25, 2007, 06:56:42 PM »
Quote from: mslinsenmayer on September 25, 2007, 06:46:03 PM
Speaking of greek, although modern vampires and eastern vampires have been done to death, how about the tradional vampires, the Lamia and the Vrykolas?

Lamia: Female vampire/ demon, ancient meditaranain.. lots of stories, many of them conflicting. A vampire that turned to a shadow by day? Or sucked blood thru the soles of men's feet as the walked over her grave?

Vrykolas: A 'temporary' vampire, could be called from the grave, was someone who died leaving a major promise unkept. Could be called forth by the promised one, and forced to fullfill the oath..

The oldest stories ussually involve a young man promising to care for a younger sister, only to be killed and the girl kidnapped. the elderly granmother forces the man to rise from the grave to find his sister...



Good stuff, ms! Far more interesting than the beat-to-death 'I am the sensual doomed Euro-boy. Fear my angsty hunger!' :P
 

25
Author Craft / Re: Are Vamps and Werewolves too overdone?
« on: September 25, 2007, 06:38:26 PM »
Quote from: fivestyle on September 25, 2007, 04:40:07 PM
Just this morning I was thinking about how almost all the real famous monsters have their beginig mythos tale. For instance Vampires have Dracula and zombies/undead have Frankenstein. But Werewolves don't really have one.

Actually, vampires and the undead predate those Victorian novels by hundreds of years. Thousands in the case of African folklore.

Werewolves have just as long a historical/folklore tradition. The beserkers of Viking lore, the Romanian varcolak, similar beasts in almost every European tradition. Lycanthropy is a Greek word, and comes from the legend of Lycaon -- a man cursed with becoming a wolf after indulging in cannabalism.

26
Author Craft / Re: Very interesting new market for the writers here...
« on: September 25, 2007, 01:20:24 AM »

Excellent overview.

27
Author Craft / Re: Very interesting new market for the writers here...
« on: September 23, 2007, 03:37:38 AM »
Quote from: SunPhoenix on September 22, 2007, 07:30:53 PM
Hm... I might consider on trying to submit something to this. So 3x 20,000-50,000 comes to about 600-1500 dollars right?

Yes, but keep in mind that -- especially for new, unproven writers -- you'll have a far better chance of selling a shorter piece: 5 to 10k words. This is pretty much a truism in the magazine marketplace in general -- even writers with glowing genre reps and records have trouble selling extremely long works. Not only is a shorter story less of a financial risk, it allows for a wider range of stories per issue. :)

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Author Craft / Very interesting new market for the writers here...
« on: September 22, 2007, 05:26:47 AM »
Thrilling Tales Quarterly: Pulp For The New Millenium

First issue to be released soon. It would be nice to get in on the ground floor here because, apparently, they have licensed some classic characters that they plan on running serials about.

I thought that this might be an especially interesting market for this board since a lot of posters here have played/play Spirit Of The Century and thus have experience in crafting pulp style characters and stories.

The pay is 3 cents per word, really decent for a start up. The only down side IMO is that they don't accept e-subs. In a sense, though, that just means they won't have as thick a slush pile. :D



29
Author Craft / Re: Are Vamps and Werewolves too overdone?
« on: September 22, 2007, 12:39:23 AM »
I'm conciously attempting to avoid all mytho-folklore tropes in the fantasy work I'm doing now. This is beastly, bitchily hard considering that the very structure of storytelling is bound up with those tropes.

It can be done, though. LeGuin's mid 70's and early 80's short work, Jeff Ford's entire career. Jeff VanderMeer, Hal Duncan and Steph Swainston also labor in this particular garden.

My...hmm, direction may be the best term...at the moment is a sort of focused use of the unexplained as both a reflection of and map through various human conditions, which are then distilled through the individual characteristics of normalized characters. The responses of everyday folk faced with 'reality unmasked; naked and with no excuse' to quote a work-in-progress (Meeting The Last Man On Earth, For Coffee: A Raincheck) functions as a form of hyperactive allegory. The metaphor rests not in the description, but in the interpretation of events and facts that fit no previous dataset.

All an experiment of course. Hell, I once wrote an entire story just to see if I could make a ridiculously convoluted plot make sense with no explanation whatsoever. I'd seen other writers do it and wondered if I could. Not to be snobbish, but the great joy of not writing to sell is that I get to pay attention to no voice but those that babble in my own head. :)

ETA: Oddly enough, the decision to use a framework of a completely unreliable universe teeming with unexplainable events has produced my most realistic stories ever. Might be a lesson in that. :P

30
Author Craft / Re: Are Vamps and Werewolves too overdone?
« on: September 20, 2007, 04:11:31 AM »
Quote from: neurovore on September 19, 2007, 03:30:03 PM
I've never been overly fond of werewolves, but there are a lot of directions one can go with vampires that people aren't focusing on at the moment.  I have very little time for the paranormal romance genre, but books like David Wellington's Thirteen Bullets do nice innovative things with bits of traditional vampire lore that have barely been touched in modern vampire fiction, and Peter Watts' Blindsight, justifiably nominated for lots of major awards this year, has among its various peculiar spaceship crew members a vampire with seriously inhuman psychology, so I think the notion is far from mined out.

IMO, 'overdone' isn't the same as 'mined out'. Overdone simply means that too many novels/stories focus on those archetypes. I'd certainly never discourage a writer from tackling them -- in fact, every writer of horror/fantasy should probably do them even if it's just to get it 'out of their system'. If you keep up with magazine (online and paper) sub guidelines, you'll see that many editors are honestly stating that vampire stories are going to be a tough sell because they are deluged with them.

I agree about Blindsight and think he was robbed at the Hugos. As much as I enjoyed Vinge's Rainbow's End, I feel the Watt's novel broke more ground, told a more exciting story, and was basically superior on a literary level.

Quote
Of course, if you're a hideous cannibalistic insectoid thing who wants the nice tasty humans to get close enough to gobble, some way of appearing mysterious, beautiful, tall and graceful is as good a lure as any.

True, true. But I was thinking more along the lines of. "Oh, Lord -- it's a bunch of stinkin' elves. Watch out, little one -- they're weak and stupid, but quick. Might lose a finger if you're not careful. Give 'em a wide berth, luv."

Quote
The thing about most contemporary takes on elves that bores me is that most of them are as you describe, on the surface, and have nothing behind that to back them up.  [ With Ford's The Last Hot Time as an honorable counterexample. ] Tolkien's elves have much more to them than that, and it's easy to miss on a quick reading of Lord of the Rings just how much there is to them - they are basically Miltonian angels dressing way down, and the couple of places where that mask slips [ "All shall love me and despair" ] are to my mind moments that stick.

Well, literary philosophy-wise I suppose I'm basically a Campbellian. Humancentric to a fault. :P

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