Both of the collections I've put together so far have been linked, which made deciding what stories to include a bit easier. In fact, almost all the pieces in Cryptid Bits were written specifically for the chapbook, and the same was true for about half of the stories in Luck and Other Disasters. There was still some curation work that needed to happen—in both cases I wrote some stories that didn't end up in the final version, and it took a bit of fiddling to get the pieces I did include into the right order. But since each of those books occupies a self-contained world, with shared characters and settings, deciding which things fit into each book was pretty straightforward.
That's not the case for every short story collection. I knew that in an abstract, of course, and now I’m getting a first-hand lesson. A few months ago, I realized I have enough speculative short stories to put together a collection—way more than enough, actually, which is mostly a good problem to have. I have options and can mix-and-match things to find the exact right set of stories. But that’s also caused a bit of a delay in getting the manuscript assembled while I figure out how to even choose which ones belong together.
One of the great things about working remotely is that, when the weather is nice, I can spend my workday outside instead of cooped up in my office. My usual routine is to start on my back patio then venture in the afternoons to a coffee shop or park—or at least, that was the pattern the last couple of years, when Pittsburgh was spoiled by fairly dry summers. This year, it's been a rare day that's gone by without any kind of rain, and I've found my plans interrupted by the weather on an obnoxiously frequent basis.
Which got me thinking: If I'm annoyed by the unpredictability of weather, that's something I could use to annoy my characters, too. The weather is one of those pervasive background elements that I think I too often neglect in my stories, which is to my detriment because it can be a very useful tool. It can be a plot driver, a tone builder, or a way to show the passage of time and ground the reader in both the where and the when of a story. So I wrote myself a couple of weather-based prompt exercises to start me thinking about better ways to use it, and I figured I might as well share them in case they're helpful for other folks, too. (If you want to check out past writing prompt posts, you can see the full list of them here).
I can tell that a writing conference was worth the attendance when I leave feeling slightly overwhelmed by all the new info stuffed into my brain. Which was how I felt leaving the most recent In Your Write Mind workshop last weekend, enough so I needed a bit of time to let my mind settle before going back over my notes to pick out the gems.
This is probably going to be a slightly more random-feeling blog post than my usual because the topics covered at IYWM were pretty varied, and the notes I took on them were filtered through the lens of “shit I find neat and/or useful”. But I also figured I probably wouldn't be the only one to find said shit neat and/or useful, and putting them together into a blog post seemed like a useful way to trick myself into actually going through my notes before they just got shoved into a folder and forgotten about—so here we are. Read on for some random but hopefully beneficial advice. I also did a similar post for last year’s conference if you’re looking for more random writerly advice.
I recently finished watching the second season of Andor. If you don't know it, it's a TV show prequel to the Star Wars movie Rogue One, which takes place right before the events of A New Hope and focuses on the less-heralded members of the rebellion who put the pieces in place for Luke, Leia, Han, and crew to have their big victory. One of those characters is Cassian Andor, whose complete backstory is revealed over the two seasons of the show.
It took me a little bit to get into Andor, but once I did it's shot up my list of favorite Star Wars stories. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't watched it—but this post isn't about Andor as a show. I'm about to get way more pedantic and nerdy, because the first thing I thought of when I heard the name Cassian Andor was a different series I've loved since childhood: the Wheel of Time. In that world, Andor is a country, in fact the largest nation in the Wetlands and where most of the series' main characters were raised.
I always find it ironic that professional editing—an industry solely devoted to words and language—has so much confusing niche terminology. I say this as someone who edits professionally, both as a freelancer and through Scribble House. One person’s content editing might be another’s structural edits, and whether these are interchangeable or mean slightly different things usually depends on who you’re asking, too.
Part of the problem is that these terms aren’t standardized, and slightly different ones are often used depending on the context. What a fiction editor calls “line editing”, the editor of online news articles might call “copy editing”, and there’s similar overlap between terms like content editing, structural editing, and developmental editing.
Lately I've been reading Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, which is a bit of an outlier read for me. I don't often read historical fiction (though there are exceptions), and usually I like a bit more action in my plots—and I'll admit, there have been parts reading this book that I've itched for something to, you know, happen. But I find the content and context fascinating enough that it's kept me reading, albeit a bit slowly.
One of the reasons I picked up The Tale of Murasaki was to get some context for The Tale of Genji, which I made an aborted attempt to read a few months back. A bit of a mental shift is always necessary when reading something from so long ago, but I found Genji particularly opaque because much of the plot hinges on the rhythms and expectations of Japanese imperial court, a world foreign to me in just about every respect.
And I'm happy to report that The Tale of Murasaki makes an excellent bridge in that regard, bringing just enough of a western, modern sensibility to ground me in this world. In many respects, this kind of far-in-the-past setting requires the same attention to worldbuilding as a secondary world. Honestly, it's easier for me to picture how the world works in a future Earth setting like Star Trek than in 11th-century Japan, probably because a speculative future world is inevitably laced with the perspectives of the time it's written in. It can't fully spring from the substrate of the future because that culture doesn't yet exist, and we don't really know what will happen between now and the 24th century that will shape how people then think. With things that happened in the distant past, there is an established cultural context separate from our own, even if we no longer know or understand the full details of it.
I’m mostly a pantser when it comes to the writing process. Now and then I’ll know where a story’s going ahead of time, and may even do a bit of outlining for longer works, but my preferred approach is just to start writing and let the story tell me where it wants to go.
Because of this, my rough drafts don’t tend to be what I would call “finished stories.” They have a beginning, middle, and end (usually) but they still don’t have an effective arc, are riddled with inconsistencies, and have the kind of rambling pacing that feels like the author’s just making shit up as they go instead of intentionally moving from one scene to the next. Which makes sense, because that’s exactly what happened.
The editing process is when I wrangle these messy rough drafts into something other people can actually read and make sense of (and hopefully enjoy). I do have some help in this process because I have an incredible writing group. But even with a workshop group or beta reader, you can’t expect them to do all the heavy lifting for you. Most stories need to go through multiple editing rounds before they’re fully finished—more versions than you can realistically expect anyone else to read.
I’ve had some somewhat contradictory reading experiences of late. On the one hand, I’ve read several wonderful short stories in a fairy tale or folklore tone that inhabit a vague and floaty world in a beautiful way. On the other, I’ve written a few different feedbacks for After Happy Hour submissions where one of my major issues was a lack of grounding—that the world felt too floaty, to the point I couldn’t picture the world the characters were inhabiting.
The right level of worldbuilding and description is a tricky balance to strike for writers in any genre, and I think particularly so for those in speculative worlds. Not every type of story lends itself to lush, lengthy descriptions, either. In some modes, sparse details are a defining characteristic of the genre. Stories that stem from an oral storytelling tradition tend to fall into this category, which includes genres like folklore and fairy tales. Mythic voices give more flexibility for detailed descriptions, but even so it can break the effect to spend too many words grounding the reader. There are other genres that need this kind of deft hand, as well. Magical realism is one example—the rules of the world need to be established enough that the reader isn’t confused, but if you explain too much then it can lose the “magic” part of the name, or start to read like a different type of fantasy.
What's especially challenging about fairy tale writing is that a vaguely defined setting is a common genre trope. Fairy tales often take place somewhere “far away” and “once upon a time”, intentionally placed outside of a historical context. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but the more solidly a story is tethered to reality, the less like a fairy tale it seems.
