Posted by Ben in interviews | 0 comments

Interview with Trent Jamieson

Trent Jamieson, Brisbane short story demi-god, local luminary of the writing scene, University teacher, Aurealis Award winner and Clarion South tutor, has written his first novel: an urban fantasy “Death Most Definite”, and soon to be the first in a trilogy.

How did you get your start in writing fiction?

I’ve always written fiction, well, since I could hold a pen and write. And I’ve always written Speculative Fiction. It’s what I grew up reading. Everything from the Magic Pudding, Lord of the Rings, and Lud in the Mist, to Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos. Spec Fic has marked the important moments of my life: it’s been a comfort through some pretty horrible things, and an accompaniment to some wonderful stuff as well. So it’s natural, I guess, that I’d want to write it too. Not that I don’t read other literature as well, but Spec Fic will always be at the heart of my reading and writing.

You have an impressive number of short stories publications. Was it a big leap to moving from short stories to the long form of novels?

Not so much a big leap, just a different direction. They’re two very different modes of writing. But I’ve been writing both for a very long time: it’s just that the short stories started selling earlier.

How did you get your break with the Death books?

Persistence. Seriously. Orbit opening their offices in Australia certainly helped. It’s a bit easier to get your foot in the door, if there’s a door to put your foot in. I found Orbit to be very approachable and fortunately they liked the idea of this series and loved the first book. Hard work, lots and lots of hard work, luck, and good timing all played their part too. And my biggest break was marrying Diana. My wife has always supported my writerly aspirations. That kind of belief is incredibly important. Without her I may have given up a long time ago. And Diana is the reason I fell in love with Brisbane and ended up writing a novel(series) set there. Diana is the keystone to all my fiction.

Your trilogy is essentially being published back-to-back over the next 2 years. Has it been difficult writing each novel in such a short period?

I’ll let you know when I finish the third book. Like any long project it has its ups and downs, but, in the main, I’ve loved writing the books. I think novels suit my temperament.

Have you had any issues with maintaining consistency between the novels?

Not consistency, my stories are very much about voice, and I think I’ve got a very clear idea who my protagonist is and how he sounds. Steven de Selby is the glue that holds those books together and, while he changes, and grows up a bit, he has very peculiar world view.

Can you tell us about the process of deciding the style of covers?

I’ve not had that much of a say in it – though I love my cover. Of course, I’ve been shown it at various stages of its development, and my opinion’s been sought, but the decision hasn’t really been mine. And, to be honest, I really don’t think it should be. I’m not really about having a cover that I love and everyone else hates.

You were a tutor for the first time at Clarion South in 2009 and we have often heard of Clarion experiences from its students. What was it like from the other side of the desk?

It was wonderful, exhausting, and exciting. I’m quite sure I learnt much more than I taught. The worst bit for me was that I had caught some sort of virus and I had to push through the fatigue – you don’t get a lot of sleep when you’re tutoring. The best was seeing all that potential in the room, listening to all those insightful critiques. You really start to feel invested in the student’s future. I’m always so excited to hear of a sale or some other milestone reached. Oh, and jealousy, definitely jealousy. I forgot about that, you’re all so much more talented than me, damn it.

Is Clarion South comparable to the QUT short story writing course you teach?

Well, this year I haven’t been doing much teaching, so many deadlines! Though I’m back in a month or so. But not really, they’re two very different things. At Clarion you are living and breathing short stories, meeting tight deadlines, and getting in each other’s faces 24/7. The short story course is one of many units a student will be doing that semester, it’s part of an integrated whole. I think either would compliment the other.

You have been writing to various deadlines for the Death books in the past months. How do you motivate yourself each day / how do you ensure you achieve the progress you need to meet those required submission dates?

It’s just a matter of breaking it down into achievable targets, knowing there’s a bigger picture, but not thinking about it too much. I’ve still got a couple of deadlines to meet yet on this series so I don’t want to be too smug about it.

What is your opinion on the recent debate over e-book pricing? Are there plans to release your Death books for e-book readers as well as print?

I must say I don’t have an opinion, but I guess it comes down to content, and what the-book contains that the paper-version may not. E-books certainly allow for a richer environment – though that makes them somewhat different to books, more book as app, then book as book. Regardless of format the e and hardcopy books go through the same editorial process, and that `ain’t cheap. So, hey, I do have an opinion. Yes, my books will be available as e-books.

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Trent’s own site can be found here and a review by Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus here .

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Posted by aidan in writing advice, writing process, writing tools | 7 comments

Lateral Thinking for Writers

The term lateral thinking was invented by Edward de Bono in the 1960s.  The basic techniques of lateral thinking involve coming up with new ideas by looking at problems in a different way and by introducing random thought stimulation.

Douglas Adams once talked about how he had got stuck writing The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.  The heroes had just been thrown out of a spaceship and he needed a way of rescuing them.  Given the sheer vastness of space it was exceedingly unlikely that another spaceship would be passing by in time to save Arthur and Ford.  Adams couldn’t think of a plausible solution so he decided to think of it in terms of judo, where you use your opponent’s strength against them.  He used the extreme unlikeliness of a rescue scenario to his advantage and invented the infinite improbability drive, which became a major plot point in the story.

De Bono has written lots of books about the subject that outline a variety of methods for generating ideas.

One of the best books I’ve read on the subject is Michael Michalko’s Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques.
Although many of the examples are aimed at business (how do I think of new ways to market my widgets?) they can be easily adapted to generating new story ideas.

One of the simplest techniques is introducing a random idea and seeing how it relates to your story.  For example, randomly choosing a word from a dictionary.  How does this new word relate to your story?

Brainstormer is a web site and iPhone app that provides random word prompts for writers.

For example, let’s say you were writing a story about a magic sword and wanted to come up with some new ways to make the sword intersesting.  (Stormbringer: the sword that drinks souls, The Misenchanted Sword that once it has been drawn has to kill someone before it can be sheathed).

You spin the dials on Brainstormer and get: Adultery, Americana, dwarf.
Hmmmm… A sword that changes size based on the wielder?  A sword that ended up in a kitsch shop?  A sword that guarantees its wielder will fall in love with the spouse of anyone they kill with the sword?

Another spin produces: Self-sacrifice, Viking, downtown city.
More ideas there.

Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold wrote a great article for the Internet Review of Science Fiction called Tapping the Idea Vein.
They give the situation of taking two words and juxtaposing the ideas associated with them:

Look around the room you’re in right now. Play Sesame Streetin your head. “One of these things is not like the other…” Perhaps something in a photograph or picture on the wall, set alongside the messiest object near you. A picture of a cow and a toner cartridge, for example.

What’s the story there?

Cows symbolize agrarian civilization, food, domestication, leather goods, milk, the American family farm, fertility. A toner cartridge is color (or the soot-black lack thereof, and by extension, Manichean dualism), disposability, the Gillette model of razor marketing, the democratization of print publishing. Now we have two sets of concepts to pair together:

Agrarianism	Color
Food	Blackness
Domestication	Dualism
Leather	Man-made materials
Milk	Marketing innovation
American family farm	Print publishing
Fertility	Disposability

Story titles leap out from this list. “Black Milk.” “Fertile Leather.” “Disposable Fertility.” Likewise ideas, or at least their building blocks. For example, a story set on a book farm. Characters who follow a dualistic religion founded on food groups.

Another technique is reversing the problem.  Perhaps you have a story where the hero’s wife is kidnapped.  A simple reversal would be to have the hero kidnapped and have his wife rescue him instead.  Or perhaps the hero decides to have his wife kidnapped. (Fargo).  Or perhaps the hero is happy his wife has been kidnapped. (Ruthless People).  Or maybe she hasn’t been kidnapped but someone keeps sending him ransom notes. (The Big Lebowski).  Or maybe he finds his wife has kidnapped someone.

Some topics have been written about so often that it’s very hard to generate any new ideas.  Vampires?  The Simpsons had reverse vampires that could only come out during the day.  Try reversing some of the stereotypes.  Vampires are usually portrayed as suave and sexy (Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, etc.) or as monstrous (Nosferatu), but how about fat, white trash vampires?  (Fat White Vampire Blues).

Using lateral thinking can be an excellent way to generate story ideas and solve plot problems.

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Posted by Steph in writing process | 2 comments

Simultaneous submissions

I know all my posts (all three of them …) are turning into this format, but what is the deal with submitting simultaneously to markets? The general rule, at least with genre short stories markets, seems to be “DON’T”. On the other hand, some places say it’s fine. Case in point: I just sent an email to The Lifted Brow, and got an auto-reply that includes the line, “Please don’t query, but as always, please do simultaneously send your work elsewhere.” Obviously you can’t simultaneously submit to markets that specifically ask that you don’t (or shouldn’t anyway; Jed Hartman over at Strange Horizons recently wrote about making a note of it in their submission guidelines and in their auto-response emails, and people sending them anyway), but if there’s a handful that do, you could theoretically send the same story to all of them, and save yourself many moons of waiting. On the other hand, if there’s only one that does, it doesn’t help that much.

In the above post, Hartman also talks about why they don’t take simultaneous submissions, and as someone who’s been doing editorial work for a periodical, I can say that’s pretty much exactly why I hate getting that email from writers that says, “Sorry, but I’ve sold this story somewhere else”. I have been known to read too much into things, but to me, that email is really saying, “Check it out, I’m in demand; you should have been faster, and then you could have had the privilege of publishing this story, na na na na na; not to mention, I totally didn’t read the part in your guidelines where you said DON’T DO THIS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD”, which only  makes me want to write back and say, “Meh, we didn’t really like it that much anyway”. Like a lot of things, the whole “rising above it” never really made sense to me as a child.

Have you ever simultaneously submitted? Ever gotten caught? (Congratulations?) I want to hear these things.

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Posted by Ben in writing process | 0 comments

Lazy sentences (lazy author?)

When editing my own work, the following words keep popping up and are almost always indicators of a sentence that just isn’t right or is carrying a few too many kilos:
- here
- there
- though
- now
These are worse than adverbs for me and deserving of instant death.
I blame the sentences. Tisn’t my fault.

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Posted by aidan in writing tools | 4 comments

Digital Immortality (the Importance of Backing Up)

Backing up is one of those things that most people think sounds good in theory, but in practice rarely bother about.

When you had to go to the effort of burning things on DVD or even worse backing up stuff on floppy drives or tapes, it was just too much of a hassle for the average computer user.

But if you’ve ever experienced a hard drive crash or had your computer stolen, then in hindsight backing up your computer wouldn’t seem like much of a chore versus the idea of having to rewrite almost your entire novel from scratch.

These days there are a few tools that make backing up easy and quick and well worth the small investment in time it takes to set up.

External USB hard drives are cheap these days.

I use Back2Zip a free program.

http://free-backup.info/back2zip.html

You choose which directories you want to back up, how often you want them backed up, where you want them backed up (e.g external hard drive) and that’s all you have to do.

Later versions of Windows include backup software and many external hard drives come with their own backup software.

There is also the very important issue of having an off-site backup.  A former co-worker of mine (in the days of floppy disks) was fanatical about ensuring his computer was backed up every night.  Unfortunately when his house was broken into, the thieves took his box of disks as well.

There are plenty of sites that offer free online storage space.  You should keep online backups of your documents.  Then if the worst happens, at least you’ll be able to recover your stories.

I use Dropbox.

http://www.dropbox.com

It offers 2GB of free online storage.  There are lots of other choices, but I’ve found Dropbox the most convenient to use.

I’m more technically inclined, so I’ve set up a script file which automatically compresses my documents directory and sends it to my online dropbox storage.  But it’s easy to backup files just by using a file browser, such as Windows explorer.

If you find all of this just a bit technically daunting, then at the very least you can email yourself a copy of your files.  Gmail has more than 7GB of storage, so it can be used as a way of keeping backups of your next award-winning novel.

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