A reminder, and random tidbits

One last thing [that I just edited to be the first thing, because it’s more important than my ramblings]: If you’re local to Utah and are a writer of the LDS faith and/or writing in the LDS market, remember that LDStorymakers happens next weekend. I believe the deadline is fast approaching (in fact, I just checked, and it’s today!) and there are no walk-in registrations due to the conference’s agreement with the hotel. So if you want to go, register now.

Now, the meandering:

Though little seems to be happening on the blog front, that’s because much is happening behind the scenes. I’m currently working under deadline on several projects, including XDM by Tracy Hickman, Curtis Hickman, and Howard Tayler, and several novels by individual authors (who I never mention by name on here because they’re not “my” projects to mention, and the work I do with authors pre-publication-process is very much behind-the-scenes work). I’m still looking for submissions for Tor, as well, though this week that’s not as high priority as the deadline work. So if you’ve been wondering where I went, well, there you have it.

In other news, though winter was officially banished a month ago, the heavens still seem to be singing Christmas carols. It snowed all morning, but when I ventured out at five to meet a friend, it had stopped and I thought that was the end of it. But noooo. My drive home tonight from a friend’s reminded me greatly of a time in high school, driving to a basketball game in my friend Tim’s ancient green Impala (he was driving—I was a freshman), when he hit the brakes and we just kept sliiiiiiding on past the high school driveway. There had to have been six to nine inches of snow on the road tonight at midnight. I did a few donuts reminiscent of that old Impala, as well, which reminds me that I have needed new tires since, oh, about October. I thought I’d gotten through the winter well enough by avoiding driving in bad weather as often as possible, but it had to snow just one more time, didn’t it?

Sigh.

But no collisions. At least, my car didn’t collide with anyone else’s (though there were a few close calls). I saw one accident, though, and no wonder, with the roads in that condition. I’m sure the snowplows have been put up for the season, given that it’s April.

Completely non-scientific thoughts on EMP-type doomsday stories

Well, nonscientific in that I am not going to even Google anything about the science on this (yet). Jericho was on TV yesterday in reruns–a big block of four episodes that I DVRed but ended up deleting when I realized that it was much later in the season, and that there are several episodes between when I stopped watching and the episodes I had. But it got me thinking about shows in which electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) are used as a doomsday device, and win.

My first example isn’t exactly the best one, but I use it for a reason. In Ocean’s Eleven (*spoilers*), the guys use an EMP to knock out Las Vegas’s electric grid for a time. With a complete acknowledgement that they’re probably playing fast and loose with the science of it, if an EMP knocks out delicate instruments, how in the world was Las Vegas able to come back up so quickly? Did they knock out all the computers on that grid, too? How many millions or billions of dollars of damage would such a pulse have done to the electronics of the part of Las Vegas that the EMP affected?

Then there’s Dark Angel–which we only see 20 years after the pulse, so there’s admittedly little dealt with in the series itself about the immediate effects of the EMP, but we do see a lot of interesting social extrapolation, where only the rich have the newest technologies and the U.S. is plunged into a new kind of depression that they might not recover from for years. (After all, when the banks’ systems crash, all those little ones and zeroes turn into just plain zeros, according to Dark Angel’s voiceover narrative in one of the earlier episodes.)

How does it happen? Well, we’ve got a service-based society, I can see how it might happen in the big cities at least. Small towns, though, tend to be a lot more self-sufficient. What Midwestern farm town doesn’t have at least two or three farmers with their own machine shops (not electromechanical–actual machine shops with tools probably inherited from their grandpa), wood shops, or even a guy or two who’s into hunting and trapping that might have a smoke shed for preserving meat? It wouldn’t serve the needs of the entire area, but that town would have resources beyond its electronics, and the food would be right out there in the fields (barring a subsequent natural disaster–it might be only corn and beans and whatever animals they might raise, plus every country garden, but they’d have food and people who knew how to cultivate it).

Limitations on even a small town, of course, would be distribution of fossil fuels and electricity. No power tools, etc. But from my experience, small towns are populated by resourceful people. As in Dark Angel, it’s the cities that would suffer most, because they generally don’t grow their own food and rely more upon electricity and fossil fuels for basic necessities like heat in the winter.

And that brings me to Jericho. The reason I stopped watching the show? All the frozen meat was thawing when the local grocery store’s backup generator died. What did they do? THEY HAD A PARTY and ATE ALL THE MEAT. No, they didn’t find the guy with the smoke shed who might be able to teach them how to preserve the meat for the winter, even though they knew they’d probably run out of food before the electricity was fixed (if it was ever going to be). No, they didn’t find the local crazy environmentalist survivalist (my town had at least one, didn’t yours?) who would be able to help them know how to cut wood in the spring and summer so that it would be dry enough to use in fireplaces and wood-burning stoves by the winter. And forget coal, which most midwestern small towns I’m familiar with would still have someone hanging on to.

Or perhaps that’s just me. My dad didn’t get an electric furnace for our house, which is 3 miles out from our small Illinois town of 2,700, until the coal hopper for our wood-burning furnace (as in, the only furnace our house had, central heat from the basement powered by wood)  finally quit, which was about 3 or 4 years ago I believe. He still cuts wood, but not as much anymore because he doesn’t have four kids at home to help him cut, haul, and stack every weekend.

We froze our meat (which we raised–pig, cow, rabbit, chicken), but my dad had plenty of friends who knew how to preserve meat, and several friends who had harness-trained horses (we raised horses for pleasure/trail riding; our family vacations were spent camping on the Jubilee College State Park horse trails near Peoria, IL) and if necessary we knew several people who could haul out their old horse or oxen-drawn plows because nobody who grew up in the Depression ever seems to have thrown anything out. (When my grandpa died in 2000, we–mostly meaning my dad and several aunts and uncles–cleaned out his barns on his farm and my grandma’s house. It took months. We found enough antiques to sell to the local antique man that we were able to establish a house maintenance fund for my grandma. We also found peaches that had been canned by my great-grandmother before she died in 1972. Sploosh!)

Okay, point being that most small towns I know have resourceful people, and the people of Jericho? They didn’t seem smart or resourceful enough to have actually populated a small town at any time in the history of the last fifty years. It was as if they’d all just moved in from L.A. last year. Oh! They did!

This is why Life As We Knew It fascinated me so much, actually. It’s not an EMP story, but it does take into account all the various ways that people can be resourceful in a doomsday scenario. And it makes me wonder how the main character of LaWKI would cope with a mere EMP blast (as opposed to the moon taking out half the earth’s ability to grow food and catastrophic climate change). I think she’d do pretty well, actually.

“Books to look for” page

I’m working on building a page of books that I recommend and that I’ve edited (which of course I also recommend!). So far, the page only has books that I’ve edited. I really love Indiebound‘s easy linking system–you look up the book, enter your affiliate number on the book’s page, and voila! A link (with cover art) is generated for you. Occasionally there’s no cover art on their site; I’ve had to do a little tweaking for the first book of Hallowmere and a random Dragon Codex, but it’s pretty easy to edit the html for that.

I need to do a little research, though, because I’d love a widget for my sidebars that generated a random recommended book (i.e., a book from a list of predetermined books) every time a page was loaded. Wouldn’t work on LJ, I suppose (though the html link is quite nice for that), but it would be great for my new site. Last I heard, they haven’t gotten widgets yet, but hopefully they will soon.

I will also have a real page today covering all the basics of my community classes with links and directions. Remember, you need to register prior to the class.

Community class and new ad

My sister was once an ad designer, and she has been helping me out in the last couple of weeks to design an ad for my critique services, which I’ll be placing in SCBWI newsletters. Check it out–pretty!

critique-ad-cropped

You’re always welcome to pass on the word that I do critiques to writers you know who may find it useful. The $30 an hour manuscript critique special is still on until March 11.

Community class: Writing SFF for children and young adults

Provo Library
Provo, Utah
Rm. 308 (Young-Card room)
Saturday, March 21, 2009
1-4 pm

It’s the first of what I hope will be several seminars, and if this one goes well I will probably be doing similar seminars in other local communities.

In the class we’ll talk about:

  • What an editor looks for
  • The importance of submission guidelines
  • How to write a killer first chapter so the editor can’t help but keep reading
  • Powerful prose for middle grade readers
  • Crafting a story teens won’t be able to put down
  • Writing within a speculative fiction genre
  • Current trends

To register, email me with your name, email address, and phone number, and the answer to this question: “What would you most like to learn at this seminar?” (This allows me to tailor the seminar to the needs of those who register.)

At the same time, I’ll need you to send the registration fee via Paypal ($40 for an individual registration, or $30 per person for groups of five or more) to the email stacylwhitman AT gmail.com.

Once I receive both the registration fee and your registration information email, I will confirm registration via email.

Come to class with the first chapter of your work in progress.

Also, be sure to ask me about critique discounts for registered seminar attendees.

And in other news…

It seems that FB has at least temporarily rolled back their terms of service to the previous, slighly less draconian terms until they can figure out why tens of thousands of people were protesting and even deleting their accounts. We’ll see what happens.

On to other news. Suddenly life has gotten really busy! Especially with LTUE coming up this week (Thurs-Sat in the Wilkinson Center at BYU), I have several things on the agenda that I need to get done today so that I can clear the schedule for LTUE. With Monday being a holiday, I took some time off to hang out with friends who normally work during the day, so I have had a bit of a shortened week myself and I’m playing catch-up now.

Coming up after LTUE, if you’re local, I’m working on scheduling a community class on writing science fiction and fantasy for children and young adults, which I’ll announce here when I’ve finalized plans (which will be tomorrow, when I print out the flyers I will bring with me to LTUE–grab one if you’re going to be there this weekend). We’ll focus on what editors look for, the craft of writing in those genres (especially when writing for young readers), and how writing for children in SFF differs from writing SFF for adults–not to mention how writing for children under 12 differs from writing for teens, and how that specifically applies in fantasy and science fiction. It’ll be a chance to get an in-depth discussion going with your questions in mind. It looks like the best time for it will be late March. If this goes well, I’m considering making it a series.

The politics of names–on naming characters

As I’ve been trying to come up with a name for a particular character in my book–one who comes from a very particular culture considered to be low-class and uneducated–I’ve been pondering on the politics of naming our characters, and how that ties into our own personal experience with people from particular SESs.

It makes me wonder: as you consider names for characters, do you take into consideration the names of people you have known–marginally or closely–or real-life figures and look for names that give you the same feel of SES (socioeconomic status), or do you pull names out of a hat and they stick?

A friend recently linked to the Social Security Administration’s baby names site, which I’ve found very useful in finding out what names were popular in a given generation, and I also tend to use names from my family history if they feel right, but that only works for me for characters I like. What about the antagonist? How do you go about naming your antagonists? How do you find the name that has the right feel in class for
a character who is of a lower SES compared to an upper SES?

I’m not sure I’m communicating this. Let’s try some specifics. It’s like the difference in naming Buffy vs. Faith. "Faith" the name is more commonplace–and Faith the character comes from a commonplace, much more lower-class background than Buffy does. "Buffy" makes you think (most likely) "rich, privileged white girl." But "Faith" doesn’t make you think "white trash" or anything–it’s just a normal name that doesn’t imply any particular status. It’s a much more politically neutral name. The children of movie and rock stars tend to have much more esoteric names than those of their less-privileged peers (Apple, Dweezil, River, etc.). One could probably make a case that naming conventions in black families can sometimes be more creative in spelling than those in white families–but it would probably depend upon location and, once again, SES. Heaven knows there are plenty of white people in Utah who have been just as creative in their made-up names, usually involving adding the syllable "La" to the beginning of a name or by smashing two names together.

So say you have a very stereotypical stepmother character, but you don’t want to call attention to the fact that she’s probably going to reflect a stereotype. (This may change in revision, but for now, that’s what is working for the story–she’s not a main character.) How would you go about naming her? There are so many possibilities, yet I don’t want to choose the name of anyone I have ever known for fear of offending them by the political ramifications of what that may appear to say about their names. Ideas?

Manuscript critique discount

We’re all dealing with tough times right now. Getting your manuscript critiqued by an experienced editor is definitely a luxury, and an expensive one at that.

With that in mind, I’m offering a discount for the next month (expires March 11) on my manuscript critique services. Critiques of submission packets (first three chapters and query/cover letter) will still be a flat $50 fee, but if you decide to have your full manuscript critiqued, I am knocking down my hourly rate from $50 an hour to $30–which for a full manuscript would involve a substantial savings.

So if you’ve been thinking about having me look at your manuscript, but couldn’t quite fit it into your budget, perhaps this may help you fit it in. Email me to discuss particulars at stacylwhitman AT gmail.com.

And then there’s the writing end of things…

James Owen just pointed me in the direction of his post from a few days ago, A Career as a Novelist–In Layman’s Terms, a metaphor which those of you who are still in the throes of writing your first book will sympathize with–and those of you with published books will probably have experience with in the way James does. I read it in quick passing and was nodding the whole way through, and in taking a second look I thought perhaps others might nod as much as me. And if you aren’t nodding from prior knowledge, let this be a lesson: writing is work. Getting that writing contracted to be published is more work. And then, you have an editor that you work with
(muahahaha), and then there’s the work of marketing. It’s almost like, I dunno, a real job.

And of course, thinking of the whole process in terms of The Fellowship of the Ring makes it even more interesting. 🙂

Also related, over at , Seanan McGuire discusses the timeline of a book–which involves a lot of work, and a lot of waiting. Great reading.

And these are the *college* students

My cousin just shared a link with me that I had to pass on–a professor who has been collecting the worst of the worst sentences from his students.

• “The person was an innocent by standard, who just happened to be the victim of your friend’s careless responsibility.”
• “Society has moved toward cereal killers.”
• “Romeo and Juliet exchanged their vowels.”
• “Willie Loman put Biff on a petal stool.”
• “Another effect of smoking is it may give you cancer of the thought.”
• “The children of lesbian couples receive as much neutering as those of other couples." Or, when asked to use the past tense of “fly” in a sentence: “I flought to Chicago.”

And my favorites:
“People who murder a lot of people are called masked murderers.”
Some of this feels like masked murder of the English language — such as the student who explained in a note, “I was absent on Monday because I was stopped on the Beltway for erotic driving.”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

It’s days like this that I miss living in Chicago, where they dye the river green in celebration. (Also, notice the white clock tower on the far left in the background? That’s one tower of the Wrigley Building, which I used to work in. It’s like stepping back in time in that building.

But last night my roommate and I watched Waking Ned Devine (me for the first time, she for the umpteenth time) and it was definitely a good substitute. Hilarious. I think all my favorite movies have quirky old men in them–for example, Return to Me is a favorite probably because of those funny old men.

So, let’s talk about quirky characters in storytelling, especially in books for children and young adults. How can a quirky character, perhaps an older person like in the two movies I just linked, bring life to a story while still being a story about the child character?

I can think of two main examples which show what I’m trying to talk about–Holes and A Long Way from Chicago. Let’s start with A Long Way from Chicago, by Richard Peck. This is actually one of my favorite books, and I’ll tell you it has nothing to do with the narrator. A Long Way from Chicago is one of the best examples I can think of where the character you most connect to isn’t a child. While the narrator Joey is a child, and the story is seen through his eyes (and in the sequel A Year Down Yonder, his sister Mary Alice’s), Grandma Dowdel is the most interesting person and she’s the cause of all their adventures.

In Holes, the story of Kissin’ Kate, while not about an elderly person, is a story set in another time-
–and a story that is also integral to Stanley’s journey, though we don’t know how until much later in the story.

Waking Ned Divine doesn’t really fit in this category of older people helping drive the story of the younger—Jackie is the instigator and main character all along—but it did make me think of how often in children’s literature we focus on the child to the exclusion of older adults. It’s important to get the kids away from the parents, for example, to help them have autonomy enough to do whatever the story requires. Don’t get me wrong—I love this plot device, and I know that kids love it. But I do think that there’s a place for amazing stories that include older people and people of previous generations, and that those two books are perfect examples of how that can be done while preserving a narrator that the child reader will identify with.

You have to admit: Grandma Dowdle rocks. That’s one hilarious story, and not just because she reminds me of both my grandmas and my great-grandma, with a shotgun thrown in.

Save