Arrant Nonsense

NanoPals on Twitter today asked, "How does religion play into your worlds? Do you allow your personal beliefs to flavour your work? Wha do your characters believe? What kind of book do you prefer to read - one that heavily includes personal faith or one that shies away from a characters viewpoints. Do pious characters bother you if they stray too far from what you personally believe?"

I'll duplicate my comment there and expand on it. It's not like I'm doing anything else, like editing, right now anyway.

Depends on what I'm writing, really. I write mainly short stories, and I've done five (out of 27) that have overtly religious characters. Three of them have recognizably Biblical angels and demons as major characters. And, yeah, that's my own Christianity bleeding into my fiction, but I still try to make them their own and not my mouthpiece. Preachiness is annoying, and so these characters are still PEOPLE in their own right with their own opinions, shaped by their experiences and their own beliefs--beliefs that don't necessarily line up with my own.

I also realize going in that these stories are hard sells in any market. They're too Christian for the secular market and not Christian enough for the Christian market (because of subject matter and some salty language)--and two of them are over 15K words and under 20K words long, and the third LOOKS like a standard "guy sells soul to devil" story, even though it's not--so they're stuck in a kind of limbo of unsaleableness.

But the beauty of the current system is that, once I've exhausted the paying markets, I can self-pub them and maybe they'll find their own market, you know?

I have also written stories where the internal theology in no way reflects my own, and many, many where religion isn't even a thing except for the occasional startled or mournful "Oh, God." It really depends on what the story needs more than anything else.

When reading, I'm fine with characters and worldviews that don't reflect my own beliefs, as long as the story is internally consistent and tells a good tale. The trope I despise above all else, however, is the one-note Stupid/Evil/Stupidly Evil Christian Character. It's boring, it's lazy, and I do my level best to subvert it on a regular basis by writing good-guy religious characters when the story calls for something like that.

( And this is stupidly long, so under the cut it goes. )

I have decided that my protags in the new thing I'm outlining live in a trailer park for over-55's. This means that old farts are taking on eldritch horrors. I am amused by this. And, you know, it's different from the norm, so.

I need to finish this outline and start the next.

Also, I spent fifteen minutes in line at the post office today so I could mail my story to that publication, and it cost me $3.30. I am unhappy about both the wait and the cost and the fact that I will no doubt find out in a week that it "wasn't right for us" because let's face it, there's a less-than-1% chance of being published in a place like that for someone like me who is not John Langdon. #firstworldproblems

But you can't win if you don't enter, and my last two to them have been "not right for us" rather than "didn't grab," so that's good. I guess. /discouraged

Annnnd Won His Soul has garnered its second rejection.

The next place I want to send it to only takes snail mail subs.

The thing is over 15,000 words long. Seventy-four pages, plus cover letter.

Not only is that a large investment in ink and postage and time in line, but, dude. The chances of getting it published in that particular market are vanishingly small. On the other hand, at least I'll know in a week or so if they want it, because they have a nicely fast turnaround time.

But markets that pay professional rates are thin on the ground for something like this. The length is problematic. Duotrope's gives me eight results that are semi-pro and up. Of those, two are unsuitable; one is for kids (which this is defintely not) and one is a shared universe (which this is not a part of). One is a contest whose results will not be announced until June. I've got something at Tor right now, so they're out. I have something at TM as well; although they do take multiple subs. I'm not sure they'd want it anyway, because there's some "graphic content" in there (whatever that means, hoo-boy, but I'm pretty sure that some of the stuff that happens in it would greatly squick more sensitive readers. I pulled no punches with this one.) It's already been at WotF.

This leaves two on the list, one of which pays a penny a word, and one not on the list, which pays a flat $100. Which, you know, okay, but I'd rather get pro rates if I can, because who wouldn't. So it seems I have little choice in the matter but to jump through this particular hoop, if I want a chance at getting my Magnum Opus actually published someplace that will pay me serious money for it.

You can't win if you don't enter.

Right?

So, yeah, I've been staring at the damn steampunk werewolf western for two solid days now, going "durrrr." My preacher and my protag have about done all that's productive with this conversation, and so I need to get the plot moving again.

And the only thing I can think of is siccing a posse on him.

Okay, maybe not a whole posse. Maybe just the hunter dude that made him jump off the train to begin with. That actually makes more sense. This way the complications are contained, because Lord knows I do not need more complications in this Thing. I'm 7700 words in and halfway into my "outline" (such as it is), and so moving to the second pinch point is a must here.

I still hate it, by the way.

In other news, I finally got a rejection for hitman!Ben, so it went off to the next market. And I've about run out of pro markets for it. *sigh* We should be hearing from Writers of the Future any day now. I'm mentally preparing myself for bad news on that front (anything other than Finalist would be bad news for me on this one), and to gin up a sub packet for it for other places. This is a hugely discouraging business.

My mother, bless her heart, has been kind of busting my chops for RPing instead of "writing things I can get paid for." Considering the fact that the last time I actually got paid for anything was four years ago (notwithstanding my recent sale for a story I wrote two years ago), I just... laugh.

I'm actually not being sarcastic. Got a rejection last night for the Squonk story and immediately flipped it to Writers of the Future, since they haven't seen it yet, the deadline is the 30th, and there's no way I'm going to finish the steampunk werewolf western in time. It is stalled like a big stalled thing. Still waiting on word for Won His Soul. Gyah, this business.

In other news, I did receive the contract for the Zombie story in the mail and sent it back, signed, immediately, so. I believe the editor said that issue would be coming out next month.

And now, more Yellowstone pictures. This group will be the miscellaneous critters and a couple of other shots.

( Follow the cut to bison, chipmunks, grouse, coyote, and pronghorns... )

Is done.

It needs a title, natch. Which I'm coming up blank on. But as soon as I figure that out, it's winging off to Writers of the Future.

I am very pleased with it. It comes in at just under 15,800 words. It's probably my most ambitious project ever, and I include the novel in that assessment. It is also every shade of Wrong, but twisted in just the right way.

Wish me luck. :)

I just checked Duotrope's for markets for Won His Soul. I probably shouldn't have.

Turns out that markets for fantasy works over 15,000 words long are thin on the ground. I knew this, of course. I didn't realize how thin on the ground they were, though.

Three. Three pro-paying markets. Writers of the Future, which I'd planned on sending it to first anyway. F&SF, which I would love to break into and has actually read a few of my last subs to them all the way to the end, but is a snail mail sub. You know how many pages this is going to be, properly formatted? UGH. And Tor.com, which takes forever and a day to get back to you.

Well. I have hopes for this one. We'll see if it goes anywhere, I guess. I've had three betas look it over and incorporated (some of) their suggestions. It's as edited as I can get it for now, and I'm meeting my Writing Buddy this weekend. Once I incorporate the changes he suggests, I'm sending it to WotF.

...I should probably send him the updated file.

Two editing passes later, I'm quite pleased with the Won His Soul story. However, it seems to be missing something I can't quite put my finger on, so I think I may pass it off to the Usual Suspects today and let them tear into it.

I talked to a publisher last night at CONduit and now have a new place to send the Faerie Show story, once I work up a submission packet for it. GOD, I hate writing synopses. Hate hate hate. I may talk with him further about that, because a summary for a short story is... not really industry-standard. It's a fledgling publisher and a paying market, although the guidelines page doesn't say how much they pay for short fiction. I will also speak to him about that, because it should say something there.

I saw Chewbacca yesterday. WOW, that was an amazing costume.

Right before bed last night, I figured out exactly the order of events for the end of the Won His Soul story. Now, I'm a pantser, not an outliner, but it seemed kind of stupid not to write down the basic points, and so I did. And now I know where I'm going and how I'm getting there. I may actually stick an END at the bottom of this thing today.

And then this morning upon awakening, I came up with a first line for the collab-fic with my RP partner, if she likes it. It will be set in this universe, which we call "Probationary Angels."

A little about my process on the Won His Soul story: This is a much more ambitious project than I usually take on. I knew going in that it was going to be long, and that it had a Big Idea of pretty large scope. In fact, it's got three of the four MICE elements (Idea, Character, Event), with some things about the Milieu also playing a fairly significant role. In order to organize my thoughts, I basically whiteboarded the thing on a sheet of paper with a pencil, which is something I've never done before.

This process worked so well that I may carry it forward to other projects. It's a lot more free-form than an actual point-by-point outline, and it let my thoughts be organized while keeping them organic and not too organized, if that makes sense. If you haven't tried it, perhaps you should. :)

Well, I un-stalled myself on the Won His Soul story this afternoon by the simple expedient of having Kaveh's test be "his best friend is ill" rather than "some random villager we hadn't met yet is ill." And I have now cracked 11,000 words and know what his next test will be, although not how I'll get to it yet.

My job is to put my characters through as much living hell as possible. Oddly, I'm all right with that...