The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Mechanics

  • Reread, Revise, Repeat

    The truth is I have very little idea what I’m doing.

    I came into NaNoWriMo a little bit of a cheat. I had a novel that I’d already spent a lot of time on, and I wanted to finish it, so I used NaNo to do so. Since then, I’ve been letting it cool. I am a big believer in the advice that after completing a manuscript you should get a little distance from it before you dive back into editing.

    The idea is you’re trying to see your story with fresh eyes. If you’re like me, the time away also gives you the opportunity to stop hating your characters. By the end of my novel, I was barreling toward the finish line because I didn’t want to spend one more day with those people in my head. I loved them when I created them, but familiarity does indeed breed contempt, and the gang and I had spent far too much time together.

    Since completing the manuscript, I’ve sent it out to some beta readers, and I’m just now beginning to get some notes. They’ve been mainly positive, but there are also a lot of good suggestions for improvement.

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  • My Love/Hate Relationship With Non-Fiction

    I actually do write non-fiction to pay the bills. I write short Web articles about computers and the Internet, or computer-adjacent topics. Like this one about teens on the Internet, or this one about my favorite lady scientist, Ada Lovelace. They’re not very good.

    If there were an office hierarchy of freelance writers, I would be that guy who does his 9 to 5: just good enough not to be fired but not good enough to advance. I’m not ambitious or educated enough to branch my career beyond the Web. My writing is merely okay. What (in my incredibly unhumble opinion) makes me a good fiction writer is my blend of character and plot — the creative parts. Technically, I’m nothing to call home about.

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  • To Serve… Others

    Asimov's robots are the ultimate in customer service. Humans should learn a thing or two from them.
    Asimov’s robots are the ultimate in customer service. Humans should learn a thing or two from them.

    I’m primarily a fiction writer. Actually 99% fiction writer. The exceptions are these posts for the Cafe, some real-life stuff on my own blog and a rather largish pamphlet I wrote back in the early 2000s (the Naughties – heh) on the subject of making mini comics.

    Once upon a time there was a website called SixShooterComix.com (it’s now defunct but you can see a shot of the forum here thanks to the WayBack Machine). I met Rob Schamberger  and Thom Thurman at a comics convention in Kansas City around 2001 and we hit it off. Rob has gone on to become recognized for his paintings of wrestlers and we’re still friends.

    Before I go any further, 6SC was very good for me. I met a wonderful artist in Svetlana Chmakova and we produced exactly one story together. There was potential for another but things never worked out. Anyway, based on the success of that story and the fact that I was still producing mini comics on my own, Rob asked me to write a column on the forum about my process. He anticipated three or four columns, but there’s a lot to making comics. Add that in with the fact that I like to talk and I produced I don’t know how many columns. Eighteen or nineteen if I remember correctly. (I have a copy around the house somewhere but it would take earthmovers to dig it out.)

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  • Wherever I Go, There I Am.

    I know what kind of non-fiction I wouldn’t write.

    Academic or scholarly writing. Memoir or biography. Mainstream journalism. Gossip or tell-all. Anything that involves an interview.

    This week’s topic was my idea. I’m really interested in how my fellow Confabulators will answer. But I’m nearly stumped.

    I already write non-fiction for my job, and I like the kind of non-fiction I’m doing now. I like reading through diverse stacks of primary source material and synthesizing it for various audiences. I like learning the obscure history of common everyday things. Who was this guy? What did he do? How did he get involved in this situation? What is his relationship to the problem we’re trying to address now, sixty years after he died?

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  • Strange and Unusual: Non-Fiction and the Paranormal

    “I, myself, am strange and unusual.” ~ Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice

    I Want to BelieveThe great thing about writing fiction is that everything you believe can be true.

    I’m not much for writing non-fiction. I don’t like referencing sources. I hate bibliographies. I’m constantly afraid of misquoting someone or failing to attribute a fact. But if I were to devote myself to writing non-fiction, I could see myself delving back into my research from my early Internet days.

    In the early ’90s, I was really into researching UFOs. So much so, that I considered myself an amateur ufologist. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Too many episodes of The X-Files and way too much time on my hands.

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  • I’m Listening

    ME_339_Advice-640x199
    Cartoon from Mimi and Eunice: http://mimiandeunice.com/category/advice/

    It seems every question here at the Café is tricky lately, for one reason or another. This non-fiction question had me stumped at first—not because I couldn’t think of anything, but because we’re a bunch of writers, most of us writing in similar genres, so other people kept grabbing my answers.

    My go-to answer was to say I’d write about depression. I was not alone in this response, so I moved on. I write urban fantasy. I read a lot of cryptozoology articles and know way more than I should about aliens, Bigfoot, and chupacabras.

    Again, that subject got snatched up for this assignment pretty quick, too.

    So, I had to dig a little deeper and be a bit more honest. I have to confess something a little weird about myself. (more…)

  • Non-Fictions

    Various non-fictions litter my reading and writing past; I am an enthusiastic connoisseur of the art of the differently true writing. Each time I find a new enthusiasm, it leads me to heaps of fascinating, genre-crossing work. Every new group of texts makes me ask myself if I can contribute something to them.

    I sometimes wonder if every woman who has escaped the clutches of fundamentalist Christianity has written a memoir; and if so, if I have read them all yet. If I haven’t, it’s not for lack of trying–I grasp those memoirs eagerly and read them through in a day or two, all other work and reading and writing thrown aside for the great moments of identification. Every one of the dozens I’ve read have the same characteristics–the chafing, the quiet doubts, the discovery of feminist thought and practice, the realization that the Bible is not literarily true, the men telling us that we were not staying in our place by thinking, etc., etc. The extreme similarity of our experiences is probably not all that surprising, for their origins are in a movement that glorifies central authority and normalisation. (more…)

  • Rewriting the Past

    I have a soft spot for ancient civilizations. I find their history fascinating. If money and time were not an issue, I would learn as much as I could about these ancient civilizations and write texts about them. Is this strictly non-fiction? No.

    One of the reasons I love ancient history so much is because there is so much of it that is unknown. So much that can never be known. Every writer on the subject writes with their own agenda, utilizing the limited primary sources to envision what they think society was like. I suppose in a sense writing about ancient history is like writing a novel. You build from a few small details and use those details to create a larger picture. If you do it right, you end up with a believable backdrop. (more…)

  • Depressing Non-fiction

    I have a short attention span when it comes to non-fiction.

    I feel like I could tackle just about any non-fiction topic, but then I remind myself that it’s probably impossible for me to write a whole book about anything. I love to do research for my novels, but to write a whole non-fiction book, I know I’d really have to dive into a topic, stay dedicated to it, and not drop it when I had the most basic understanding of it.

    That’s why I like the Confabulator Café posts. Perfect little 300-500 word bites of knowledge imparted from my brain to you. Short, concise, and no need of extensive (if any) research. I can handle that. I could probably talk about myself for a whole novel. So perhaps that’s what my non-fiction book would be. I did write a memoir once. Memoirs can be my non-fiction. (more…)

  • Literature and History

    It was just a few years ago that I was writing non-fiction every month for school. Throughout my college experience, I was enrolled in several high-level English classes which often required study and commentary on works of literature. One of my favorite assignments was the analytical research paper.

    I enjoy arguing and a research paper is arguing in a controlled format. You make a point, and back it up with facts, anticipating criticism and opening debates. As an English student, I took a lot of literature classes, and my best arguments were on the writings of the English Renaissance.

    Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe were (and are) my favorite, along with a healthy appreciation for other noteworthy works like the King James Version of the Holy Bible or the plays of Ben Johnson. For some people, these are nearly in another language, nearly incomprehensible. I find that with a little bit of study, what looks nearly incomprehensible becomes beautiful, expressive verse that cannot be matched by anything else.
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