Fanatical Pupil

I’ve listened to Tobias Buckell give advice to aspiring writers many times on the Adventures in Scifi Publishing podcast. Turns out he is writing the next Halo book: The Cole Protocol.

If only I’d made the actual decision to be a writer when I started my first book back in high school, I’d have found my voice already, and could be published and writing in the worlds of Halo, Mass Effect, or Gears of War.

More fun from Roberson’s Interminable Ramble.
Grab the nearest book, or the book you are currently reading (if the one nearest to you is going to be lame), go to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and blog it. Then tag five people.

From Richard (K) Morgan’s Altered Carbon:

You don’t fuck with the corps and live to write songs about it.

Nice.

And now, to tag some people… archphoenix’s not so deep thoughts, Musings of a memory leak, and matasar.org.

From an interview in SFX magainze. Here’s my favorite part (and not cause I’m a sucker for punishment, but rather because I need to absorb this particular bit of advice):

SFX: What one tip would you give to a new writer, inspired to put pen to paper for the first time?
Paul Cornell: “I’ve got one sentence that sums it up: ‘it is your job to seek out harsh criticism of your work and change it as a result’. That, frankly, is hideously painful. But boxers don’t get good by avoiding being hit. If an editor, or someone else, starts offering you criticism, listen, make notes, and change the work as a result. If you start arguing, saying, ‘No, you see, what I meant by that was…’ you’re not a writer yet. You’re trying to dodge instead of learning what the blows mean.

I know I have to get into the feedback loop somehow. Being as I’m 17,000 words into Hear the Grass Grow, you think I’d feel like it’s time to get some critique. And I am getting to that point. But right now, even though I have most of the major pieces of the story in place, there is still no ending, and not enough to really fill the gaps between many of the scenes. They kind of look like the new bricks around the garden in our backyard: a definite line, but one where the pieces could get knocked around pretty easily by the lawnmower. I want it to feel more like the line in the front where the bricks are a clear line of demarcation, sunken in like they’ve been there and belong there. When I get to that point, then I’ll be ready to have other people tell me which bricks are crooked. It’ll take more work to adjust them, of course, but at least I’ll know that those people won’t secrelty be thinking “he just kind of slapped this pile together, didn’t he?”

And I’m done with that metaphor now.

From Roberson’s Interminable Ramble (via Christopher Bird):

Go to Google reader.

Hit the following keys: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B and A.

(Heh.)

6/4: 91
6/5: 0
6/6: 0
6/7: 257
6/8: 0
6/9: 0
6/10: 435

There are two things that worry me here: The first is that the bulk of those words (and there’s not that many of them) are on a new project that I just started a couple weeks ago. This follows my habit of starting a multitude of projects and not finishing them. The ability to actually finish a project is, of course, the main thing that separates people who get published from the people who have unfinished works sitting on their desktop forever.

The second thing worrying me is the lack of determination to write every day. As you can clearly see, I have not yet formed the necessary habit of writing every day. I’ve been posting to this blog nearly every day (though several of those posts came from drafts started a while ago), but that doesn’t count as “writing” because it’s not writing fiction. However, you can also see that the public shame (as it were) of posting my word counts led me to write 435 words which I might have just left for a later date if not for knowing that I had to post this. Yes, I know there’s approximately 2 people who read this blog, but even that is enough to push me to at least a weekly writing habit.