This one’s a little late, but I didn’t want to let it pass without notice. Over the summer the French science fiction journal Galaxies published an issue that included a “dossier” on yours truly, encompassing a review, an interview, a bibliography and a French translation of my short story Liberator, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Galaxies is a beautiful publication, very nicely designed and put together, and I’m honored to appear there. Sadly, my forebears stopped speaking French long, long ago and I’ve never taken it on myself to learn, so I can’t read a word of it.

In closing, a note to all you budding novelists out there—try to publish a few short stories, because down the line someone, somewhere will ask to re-publish one as a means to introduce a new set of readers to your work. I’ve only ever written a handful myself, but they’re nice to have around.

The Galaxies cover and first page of the dossier.

Just over a year ago I announced that I wasn’t satisfied with the responses I was getting from readers on my novel-in-progress The Wild, so I was going to undertake yet another revision, primarily of the story opening. Later in the year I talked about the butterfly effect and writing—how the partial revision I’d originally envisioned had turned into a complete re-write of the entire manuscript.

The re-write turned out to be a stuttering, sputtering process, with periods of productivity interrupted by long periods of nothing much getting done. But late in the game things finally started to click. I was suddenly immersed in the process, and completely neglected my other projects, with the happy result that Draft 3 was finally finished yesterday.

Hoorah!

The next step is to send it to a few test readers, to see what sort of reaction it gets. I’ll confess I’m nervous. The last two drafts didn’t fare too well. Let’s hope this one does better!

In the meantime, I get to start something new.

I enjoyed and admired the movie Inception, and highly recommend it. I also learned a couple interesting things from it, from a writer’s perspective. (I don’t think there are any spoilers in the following, but if you’re like me and want to know as little as possible about a movie once you’ve decided to see it, than come back later . . .)

* The tech doesn’t have to be explained. The script successfully handles lots of tricky concepts, but says not one word (that I can recall) about how the architecture of shared dreams is communicated, and that’s okay. I don’t need to know. I just need the “What if”—what if we could do this. Coming from a hard science fiction background, this was enlightening.

* World building isn’t always necessary. So far as I could tell, the story was set in the present, in the world we live in, except that this dream technology exists. There’s no attempt to extrapolate what the world might look like ten or fifteen years hence when this technology is maturing, or to explore what other effects it might have on society. The story is tightly focused on itself and not at all interested in the world at large, which works great in this movie.

And a minor bonus lesson:

* Titles are tricky. I love one word titles, but “Inception” was hard to get my head around. Exception? Incision? Invictus? What the hell was it again?

If you can remember the title, go see it, and let me know what you think.

I thought that somewhere, somewhen, I had written about the brainstorming method that has served me well over the years, but after spending way too much time looking back over blogs and searching emails, I can’t find it, so I guess it’s safe to talk about it again.

The subject came to mind after reading the blog of a fellow Maui writer, Toby Neal:

At the time I listened to this lecture I’d begun Hawaiian Orchid and was about halfway through it. I was stalled, losing interest and faith I could finish it, and out of ideas. But I wrote a question on a 3X5 card: “Who’s the bad guy?”

It wasn’t two hours later when I had the answer! I ran to my computer and feverishly typed out the entire showdown scene. I’d never been so galvanized. But it was way too soon in the book, so I began writing down other questions, or even just the glimmer of an idea, like, “Gunfight Scene” which I thought would be cool to have but had no idea how to do, write, or work in. The ‘answers’ would appear, almost like magic.

I like the sound of this technique and I intend to try it out sometime soon. The method I’ve used is similar but it’s a step closer to traditional brainstorming. Very simply, it involves sitting down with a pen and paper and writing down questions about the story and the characters, and then trying to answer them. Absurd answers are fine, so long as they are answers. Oh yes–and the pen keeps moving. Try not to stop writing. This is where it becomes the same as traditional brainstorming. The big difference is that instead of writing anything that comes to mind, the mind should stay focused on story problems. If answers aren’t coming to the question just asked, try asking different questions!

This technique doesn’t always work, but when it does, it works really really well. I don’t think I could have written my early novels without it.

Oh–and despite often-heard opinions to the contrary, typing works just as well as handwriting for me–sometimes better.

Yesterday I finished up current changes on another chapter of The Wild, leaving only a couple of chapters to go before the end. But a quick survey of these last pages revealed something I hadn’t quite realized before–or had refused to notice. All the plot devices I used before, all the motivations, even the loose ends that get tied up in the climactic scenes–all of these have to be changed.

The characters will remain the same, as will the location and even the ultimate result, but the details of how it all happens–just about every part of that will need to change.

At first I was extremely annoyed. But then I drew up a list of all the plot elements that now need to be included and it turned out that there was a lot to work with. Next I went on a long walk. I don’t usually get ideas while walking or working in the garden and such, but sometimes it helps, and this was one of those times. Short scenes started coming to mind, events, motivations . . . I even called home a couple times to leave some ideas on the answering machine so I wouldn’t forget them. I’m feeling better about it now. I’m even starting to think I could have a much better ending this time around.

There are all sorts of ways–many of them sounding almost legitimate–to persuade yourself not to sit down and spend time actually writing. For example, yesterday I was up early as usual. I had finished my compulsive reading on the Internet and, feeling virtuous, I booted up the laptop fully intending to dive right into the novel. But then it occurred to me that my husband would show up for coffee and breakfast at any moment and then I would be distracted . . . so there was really no point in getting started on writing just yet. I figured I might as well spend the next half hour working on one of the websites . . . and then of course that half-hour turned into the entire day and I never did open up the writing file.

So technique #1: Let yourself be distracted by legitimate, alternate work!

My work time lately has been divided between three major projects, the most neglected being the novel. But in the past few days I’ve returned to working on it and have managed some decent progress. Today’s efforts resulted in only a bit of forward momentum because I needed to backtrack (yet again) and lay in some foreshadowing and explanation of a smallish plot point. Hopefully the incident will now be clear to the reader.

It’s really a challenge sometimes to figure out what the reader knows at any given point, as compared to what the writer knows. I’ve got so much extra plot knowledge rattling around inside my head that I have to make an effort to remember that the reader is naturally going to be less informed and things have to be explained on occasion, and clarified. But today’s effort has produced good results, and once again I am poised to move onward.