Fiction Writing Advice and Discussion: Read. Write. Crit. Repeat.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Fiction Writing Advice and Discussion: Read. Write. Crit. Repeat.

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Huh. What markets are the four editors with?

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 21:38

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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 19:31

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

My book's finally going great guys, closing in on the end :toot:

# ¿ May 17, 2017 04:22

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Man it ain't like that.

Being published won't change anything about the internal struggle. How you think of your work, how to make yourself believe you have something to say, comparing yourself to better writers or writers getting prizes or writers landing huge advances. It's 'the next thing will make me feel good' all the way down. So don't put yourself down! You gotta start beating those habits now! The eternal struggle can't wait :shepface:

# ¿ May 17, 2017 04:39

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I think some of those openings are pretty neat in any timeframe :shobon:

# ¿ May 31, 2017 03:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Anybody who cares about Genre Purity is probably a dweeb you should ignore :yeah:

# ¿ Jul 22, 2017 04:38

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Agent355 posted:

I work overnights in the summer as a security guard, so it's 8 hours of sitting in complete darkness, outside, with no internet and nothing to really do

This is the job I want

# ¿ Jul 25, 2017 15:25

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

anime was right posted:

do any of yall have any advice on stuff like fantasy/scifi/world cons etc and networking there or anything thanks peace appreciate it

has anyone on the planet actually been published through a paid pitch session? (probably, not often, i'm betting)

I skipped like a hundred posts sorry but I had to say, in general, money should ALWAYS flow towards the author, never away. You should not need to pay for anything to get published. Maybe there's some kind of legitimate 'buy an audience with an agent' scenario but if so I've never heard of it.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 01:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Definitely the first, for me; I think the problem with the second is that it�s pure narrative. We don�t get any of Danny�s thoughts or feelings about what he�s seeing. Every sentence also gets the same structure - clauses and commas - so there�s no rhythm of shorts and longs and it reads sort of flat.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2017 15:47

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

What's going on guys, I loving hate prose. Did we figure out how to write yet, and if so, what's the trick.

# ¿ May 10, 2019 19:04

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

A lot of great stories nothing really happens, characters just go through a string of incidents while having thoughts and feelings about something important which happened before the story. You gotta be really good to pull it off, though.

Recovery narratives are like that, often. Post-loss, post-trauma, post-addiction. The jeopardy is, will the character go back to the bad place? And just living an ordinary life is the triumph.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 18:28

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Couple of the more unusual things about Earth:

�Moon is just the right size to eclipse the sun
�The dominant species (humans I guess) are INCREDIBLY inbred. We are just absurdly homogeneous, I think the stat is something like 'the two most distantly related humans are more closely related than two chimps on opposite sides of a river.'

I don't know why either of these things would make a space tyrant hesitate.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 03:54

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

All the truly good and original creation myths I�ve read required drugs.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2020 01:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I am an absolute piece of poo poo who cannot write a sentence. Publishing was a mistake

# ¿ Jan 29, 2020 19:47

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I want to delete every loving word of these page proofs. Prose like piles of soggy tissue. A heap of hosed up peeled up stained linoleum

# ¿ Jan 29, 2020 19:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The awesome thing about page proofs is that you can't make any large changes, just tiny edits. So I'm unable to follow through on my all-consuming desire to entirely tear down this book's prose and rewrite it. That's good for hitting my delivery date!! Too bad I loving hate the book :shepicide:

I think there's a good story in here but the micro-level prose decisions and the limp structure just utterly kill it for me.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2020 21:46

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Generally readers find POV changes disruptive and confusing (especially early in the book) and you have to make them pay off quick. They feel like they're starting over again just when they got invested in the last POV.

Also if it's not a full length novel with a wordcount >40k or something, you should probably just have a single POV.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2020 03:37

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

There's always 'writing well enough to break the rules' but I think in most cases rapid POV swaps towards the start are untenable and should be avoided. And if it's not a full length novel you should almost never have multiple POVs at all.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2020 06:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Idk what the actual term is but I think of 'the form of the prose should reflect the content' as incarnation.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2020 17:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Europa life!

A gigantic, bristling drifter appears on the icebore camera�like a dandelion seed made entirely of arms. Bright red and yellow markings betray its evolution in shallow seas, where some light passes through the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion which serves as both hunting and breathing. Gentle tides in Europa�s sea help the arms pump fluid. When prey drifts close, attracted by plankton that cake on the drifter�s skin, nearby limbs slowly fold and coil down to draw the victim into a central stomach, where thready parasites wait to crawl into the victim�s flesh and digest. Everything it does is slow and intestinal. Pulsatory. Brainless.

Sometimes the limbs bicker. Two are dead and fuzzy with rot. They strangled each other.

It is a colony organism. Without mind or higher structure. If threatened, it will discorporate. The limbs will coil and spasm, the core will tear apart in a puff of fluids, and all those hundreds of arms will slither away into the dark beneath the ice, fat worms of terror searching for a hide. Only the digestive parasites will remain behind. They are expelled in a wad so that their panicked squirming will act as decoy.

I despise it. I would have it killed, except that I am repulsed by the thought of its final disintegration.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2020 18:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Have you seen American Psycho?

# ¿ May 8, 2020 19:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

take the moon posted:

American Psycho dude is def not a pzombie imo

�...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.�

# ¿ May 8, 2020 20:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I thought the style of performative social excellence and obsession over superficial traits might be useful or inspirational.

# ¿ May 8, 2020 20:30

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The idea is they're exactly like a normal person just with no qualia. No first-person experience of cognition.

# ¿ May 8, 2020 20:34

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Just reacting to your first paragraph, keep an eye on the rhythm of your prose. Most of that paragraph is sentences of the form "Words, comma, words." When you repeat the same structures over and over it tends to lose the readers and sap the energy of the piece. Try to break it up. Use short sentences too. Like so.

Generally I think prose should obey a rough pink noise distribution�short sentences should be the most common, mid-length sentences are moderately present, long sentences are rare. Sentences present in proportion to their simplicity.

# ¿ May 9, 2020 22:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Also I think the phrase 'blackness enveloped him' is under a fifty year moratorium. It's not your fault, it's just been depleted of all meaning by constant overuse.

# ¿ May 9, 2020 22:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I don't blame anyone who can't write when they have a full time job. I can't even write if I have a chore to do later in the day. I need my 9 AM start and nothing else on my mind.

# ¿ May 26, 2020 05:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Gonna start this lovely book I was supposed to have finished by next month :hai:

# ¿ May 26, 2020 15:38

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

There are plenty of good epistolary style novels. The only major problem is you can't do real time action.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 15:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Doctor Zero posted:

What the Christ is a zumbo?

Welcome to Zumbocom. Anything is possible at Zumbocom. To Zumbocom welcome.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2020 14:31

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The prose snagged at me a couple of times but in general I think you've got a really distinctive voice that's not the same close third person reportage everybody uses in everything. I like it. Keep pushing at it.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2020 19:08

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Shageletic posted:

it's kinda tough to get the full experience of music in the written word, I'd suggest looking up some enthusiastic yet knowledgeable folks on youtube like Rick Beato or TwoSetViolin to get the proper language. Better yet, try loving around with an instrument. A small keyboard is fun and easy to play around with, just tinkle around with the seven notes until you find something you like, its the best way to really feel the joy of making music.

Anyvay, submitted pitches to some editors on twitter on my completed manuscript and gotten good vibes off it. Trying to figure out what to do next, it wasn't something like pitmad so I can't just submit a query letter to these individual editors just because they seemed to like it. What do you with a good twitter pitch. Make it the first paragraph in your query letter? Anyone ever do that?

Query agents, no?

# ¿ Aug 3, 2020 04:01

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Dr.D-O posted:

Recently I wrote a piece of flash fiction for a contest Weird Tales was running. Despite not writing a lot before, I really enjoyed it and was hoping to write more short fiction in my spare time. Ideally, I'd like to submit my work for publication somewhere.

I was wondering what people's experiences have been with submitting short stories to online magazines for publication?

You will be rejected for years, gradually improve, start consistently selling, and, if you keep at it, end up placing stories in your dream markets. if you don't get tired of casting stories into the void along the way since nobody reads short fiction except short fiction writers

Don't shortsell yourself. I think that if a market does not meet a certain standard of pay and prestige it's better to not sell a story than to sell it there. In SFF (this does not apply to other genres!) I'm not aware of any good magazines that take simultaneous submissions, but ymmv.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2020 19:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Right, I�m just specifically familiar with SFF where simultaneous submissions are a big no no. In other fields it�s different.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2020 20:06

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Mycroft Holmes posted:

Another criticism I had was that I was saying what the character was doing and not describing it. The character in question was making a gun. Any advice on how to describe an action without making it boring?

Just read a bunch of good writing, there's no substitute for absorbing it directly.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2020 23:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

CitizenKeen posted:

I find it interesting that all the discussions revolve around television.

Are there any good books that go on for more than one book, but end with unresolved questions?

My gold standard (my role model) is the Honor Harrington books.

I think the Harrington books are a great example of the perils of stretching out a series. The last arguably good book was the one where the writer planned to kill the protagonist. He didn�t, and everything since has been catastrophic.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2020 23:55

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I like Annihilation and Authority and I even like Acceptance the best :shobon:

# ¿ Sep 17, 2020 04:24

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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 19:31

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Authority is great once you realize that there is a ton of really important stuff happening right under the protagonist's nose and he's just not catching it. It's a book that trusts the reader a lot and that can be frustrating if you don't trust it too. Pay attention to the chapter titles!

# ¿ Sep 17, 2020 05:14

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Fiction Writing Advice and Discussion: Read. Write. Crit. Repeat.

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