Rachel S.

Good Morning, 2026   Updated this week!

This entry was tagged journal ramble status check and posted on by

Well! It has definitely been a year.

I was just rereading my last proper update and I was perhaps overly optimistic about my writing life. It was a rough year and my priorities shifted hard as my cat got sick. She passed in December of 2025. I’d rather not elaborate now, as it still feels very private, though perhaps I shall post about it in a later update. Circumstances did mean, however, that my creativity got set on the back burner, waiting for me to return to it.

Since the beginning of the year, my creativity has indeed returned with enthusiasm. I’ve edited up an old short story that might become the foundation of a future novel, wrote an entirely new novelette to explore the space opera world I’ve been tinkering with, and have been writing informational essays about different aspects of writing for this year’s GetYourWordsOut community. The essays I plan to poke through, modify a couple, and post those up here on my blog. There’s a couple I am pretty pleased with that I’d like to share.

With the resurgence of my creativity, I’ve also been drawn to the book community on Instagram and have dipped my toe in there with an account. I’ve been meaning to create one for a while, though I must admit it’s daunting reading all of the advice on what to do and not do, etc. Is it not enough to want to talk to people and enjoy their work? I’ll figure it out, I’m sure, but I feel like it might take me a bit to find the optimal mix of chitchatting with people and posting my own short nonsense things that don’t necessarily need to go up on my blog proper.

I’ve got a handful of project ideas I’m slowly developing in the background of working on Almod, including (hilariously, at least to me) a screenplay. I suppose it was only a matter of time, living in LA, before I succumbed to having just one really good screenplay idea. The book I got to help me figure out what I’m doing is the Screenwriter’s Bible by David Trottier, and I’m enjoying the tone of it. It’s written with a pleasantly exasperated ‘here are best-practices but, really, use your common sense in applying them’ vibe that feels very relatable.

As for Almod himself…

Well. I feel like I must put down precisely where I am in the process, for accountability’s sake.

  • I am on chapter eight of twenty-four, in major revisions.
  • My goal, after this revision, is to start sending the thing out in query.

I am very much ready to move on to new projects, but I’m so close to flinging Almod out into the world. My only obstacle is that this revision pass has some major developmental edits and, because of that, I’m redrafting a handful of chapters in their entirety. Every single change I’ve made has been for the better and when I’m done I will have chopped off a good number of extraneous words. As long as I can refrain from writing any more new short stories (…ahem), I will be making steady progress on this until it’s done.

My hope is to blog about said steady progress. 🙂 Hence the accountability. I am resolving, right now, to not vague that I’m ‘making progress’ and ‘doing good!’ and then sit at 8 of 24 for the next two months.

Here’s to posting actual numbers and blazing my way through these edits. Cheers. <3

New Instagram!

This entry was tagged instagram social media status check and posted on by

Good morning, it’s been a bit. 🙂

I’ve decided to dip my toe into the Instagram (Bookstagram?) world, and I’m very slowly setting things up. Instagram has been my casual social media of choice for the past little while, mostly for watching crafting videos and enjoying art. The past few days I’ve been poking around other author Instagrams, though, seeing what is to be seen and enjoying hearing about others’ projects. I figured it’s about time I actually joined the community there instead of just lurked. There are so many delightful people and I’ve decided that May is the month for making friends.

Find me at WriterRachelArchive if you’re so inclined. I’ve put up precisely one post so far, but I figure I’d update you now while it was fresh, shiny, and new. <3

Hello, 2025!

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Good morning! Welcome to May 2025, where I haven’t posted to my very own blog and website for two years now. I honestly don’t even know where to begin. Two years is long enough that…well.

There are two major, long-term things to update on. First is that I gently left Pandamoon’s Editorial Director role and had taken on the role of very occasional advisor and website tech. I enjoyed my time with them immensely, but I wanted to shift my overall career into one of a writer rather than an editor. The second long term thing is toward that end: I finished Almod Book One, have put it through a lengthy beta process, and am currently finishing up the second draft before I query.

Tangentially, may I recommend joining a critique group or two? The lovely people in mine took Almod apart, piece by piece, and I’m honestly a stronger writer now than I was when we started. I’ve been learning to trust my gut, too, as well as learning about how to spot when something of my own isn’t working long before I put it in front of any kind of audience. Also, even if I am not currently doing much formal editing, I do still find great joy in giving people constructive feedback and positive commentary and getting to see the behind-the-scenes work on pieces of fiction. I find that very satisfying in any configuration, so my critique groups are a win all around.

That said, Almod is near completion! This draft has more large changes than I’d hoped, but they’re all good, solid changes that bring the whole thing more in line with how I want my characters to be read. So that’s ongoing.

I have also been reading a great deal about game narrative and design, with the intent of looking into video game writing. I’ve always loved designing games, and I have a couple of small ones that I’m noodling around with. Once Almod is in the query stage, I intended to start letting people playtest some of them. My ultimate goal is to write for games in some capacity, though just what that capacity is remains to be seen.

Other than that, writing-wise, I’ve joined the Get Your Words Out (GYWO) challenge this year, mostly for the pleasure of being part of an active writing community that’s busy all year. I had participated in it roughly ten years ago, and it has just as many delightful people participating now as it had then. Not only has it been a lot of fun to chat with others, the challenge has encouraged me to get back to writing short stories, whether they’re to be posted in public or not. I hadn’t realized how much I missed writing short stories while I was working on my novel until I was knee deep in two of them and planning several more.

I have, over the course of the last few years, also pared down the social media I’ve been participating in. Everyone I followed has dispersed to the far corners of the internet, so there’s no single place anymore to scroll and enjoy. And, honestly, I had a bad habit of losing hours to scrolling. Hours that I wanted to use writing. Since I did actually finish my book, I feel like I made a pretty okay choice there.

The only unfortunate part of having less of a social media presence than I used to is that I have entirely neglected to “platform build” as the kids call it. Such a thing does not come naturally or easily to me. I’ve always been very private. While I do enjoy being friendly and social, I also have very little mental and emotional bandwidth to dedicate to the task. That and, you know, I’m pretty well an introvert. My focus has thus been on writing, because I won’t have anything to set on my platform and gesture at if I don’t.

In setting up my website again now that I’m venturing back into the online landscape, I’ve found myself looking back a couple of decades to when blogging was a big thing and everyone who was anyone had a lively RSS feed. That’s not so much a thing anymore, especially for authors. (Alas.) The general goal for blogging as a writer seems to have evolved into helping people find you first and to be an outlet for writing second. Thus, most of everything is packaged for one of the social media platforms or it’s search engine optimized.

I honestly do prefer more old-school blogging. My blog has its fair share of informational posts and essays, sure, but it also has those status updates and bits and pieces about various projects I’m working on, etc. That’s my preference, blogging-wise, and I’m going to try and keep that up. 🙂 A little bit of accountability in my active projects would do me good, and I have been wanting to make my website seem less dead for, ah, literal years at this point. Now that I’m editing my little heart out on my own project, I have a lot of room in my brain to write, and I really don’t want to distract myself with a new creative projects when I’m redrafting chunks of Almod. I do, eventually, want to finish sometime within the next few months.

Here’s to blogging in 2025!

Finishing the Unfinished

This entry was tagged editor hat writerly process and posted on by

Edited March 14th 2023: The link that this used to go to no longer works, so I decided to simply post the full text here. I’ve left my old intro here in quotes for posterity.

Last month I actually wrote a blogpost—and posted it over on the Pandamoon Blog instead of here. I figure it’s aroundabouts time that I posted a link to it. 🙂

It’s called “Finishing the Unfinished,” and it’s about some of the failures and fears that might prevent someone from finishing their manuscript.

I hope you enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!

Finishing the Unfinished

Writing a book is a massive project to tackle, a veritable marathon of words. Sometimes—a lot of the time—that book will go unfinished. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Not all manuscripts need to be finished to accomplish what they are meant to do for their writer.

For those manuscripts that need to be finished, though, I ran across an applicable quote some years ago, though I can’t for the life of me remember where or by who. If my intensely paraphrased version rings a bell, please let me know where it’s from in the comments. 🙂

The gist of the quote was this: most of the time, a project will go unfinished for one of six reasons. Three are failures in action on the part of the writer and three are fears that prevent them from moving forward.

The failures: Going too fast. Doing too much. Lacking perseverance.
The fears: Fear of finishing. Fear of bitter work. Fear of your own ferocity.

Going too fast

You wouldn’t think this might be a failure, but consider how often a writer burns themselves out after the first several thousand words by jamming all of them into the span of a day. Or perhaps you outstrip your own creative momentum, running out of things to write because you’re not giving yourself enough thinking time.

And I certainly understand! Going too fast and needing to slow down is difficult in part because enthusiasm is a bright flame that can gutter if not fed, and inspiration comes and goes. For the massive project, understand that it will take many days, certainly weeks, often months, and sometimes years. It does not need to happen all at once. You eat an airplane one bite at a time. Settle in, find new ways to feed your enthusiasm for your project over time, and forgive yourself for not being done right this moment.

Doing too much

Over-ambition can kill a project before it’s started. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the kind of undertaking a manuscript can be, especially if you’re still grappling with plot and structure and characterization and dialogue and literary conventions and genre conventions and avoiding stereotypes and researching and knowing that someday, people are going to read your baby so it has to include everything and be perfectly executed, and and and.

Breathe and narrow your focus. You are allowed to have multiple drafts, and those drafts are allowed to focus on only one aspect you’re polishing. If you’ve ever watched a digital painter’s timelapse of their art, you’ll see them rough things out, sometimes cannibalizing old work, and then they’ll gradually refine until they’re jumping between elements for the fine details. You don’t have to know everything at the start and you’re allowed to make discoveries and learn during the process.

Also release the idea that you need to devour the entire banquet. Your novel or manuscript–especially a later one in a series–does not need to tackle everything. Not all the plot hooks. Not all the passingly-mentioned characters, elements, or research topics. Your future books in your series will thank you for all the lovely plot hooks that you left laying around as you base entire adventures on a single unexplored pathway. Plus, you honestly don’t need to digress about whales (Moby Dick) or sewers (Les Mis), and you don’t need to have us follow your new side character for three chapters. I’m sure your research and your characters are lovely, but focus, please. You will never finish your book or, if you do, it’s going to be more words than a publisher will publish.

Jamming too much into the story itself will confuse it and make it stop working. At this point, even if you have a finished manuscript, it will be nonfunctional. Large, complicated stories with a lot of moving pieces are glorious, but they’re created with a mixture of precision and serendipity, and everything on the page feeds into the story. What story are you telling? Does your reader really need everything? What mysteries can you leave within your story’s pages?

Lacking perseverance

Of the three failures, this one is the most straightforward. You can’t finish if you don’t actually try to finish. This refers to all the advice of Butt-in-Chair (BIC), write every day, sacrifice to get ‘er done, etc. and so on. Make time, do the thing, yes, of course, we’ve heard this again and again.

The thing about perseverance? It isn’t flashy. It’s quiet, consistent, and it doesn’t even need to be every day. It can be cyclical or sporadic or routine. Perseverance is, at its heart, about priorities and limitations. Is finishing important to you? Then finishing will need to come higher in your priorities and you will need to work within your own limitations. Some writers have written on their phones when they don’t have access to a computer. Some writers must find a dedicated first-reader to help encourage them before they can make any headway. And some writers have children and can only write in a gasp during the wee hours of the morning.

These writers are willing to make writing important to them, and they’re willing to acknowledge their unique circumstances might mean their writing time won’t look like anyone else’s.

Fear of finishing

Whether it’s fearing what comes after the manuscript is done, or fearing that once it’s done you’ll be adrift, or that your book is too awful to finish and will never be anything better, finishing can be terrifying. The fact that this project has been important to you somehow only makes the fear of finishing worse. It’s common to stop at a point in writing (different for everyone) and wonder if you should even try.

A finished manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect, however, and the only people who expect perfect are pedants. Yes it’s worth it, especially if it’s important to you.

Fear of bitter work

Writing can be difficult. There’s too much to keep track of, and the creative process can be messy and exhausting. At a certain point, all of that New Manuscript Enthusiasm is going to drain away and you’re going to be left with only your manuscript and all the reasons you started it to try and figure out how to move forward from there. For those that hate writing but love having written, this fear can be especially brutal, and even if the joy is in the puzzle, it’s a complicated puzzle.

Some important things are hard to do. That does not make them any less worth doing.

Fear of your own ferocity

Of all the fears, this one is probably my favorite. Your ferocity is your uniqueness—your voice, your passion, your commitment. What you desire and what you need to share. Writing true things, unique thing, requires a certain amount of risk, and putting yourself out there, revealing your thoughts and experiences and emotions, even through fiction, is absolutely terrifying. Passion is often punished, especially when we’re young and fitting in with the pack is a matter of survival. Writing is an exercise in training yourself out of shame and approval-seeking to a point where you understand that standing alone on the stage of your craft is a necessary expression in order to offer the world something new.

If you think something is important, you’re the only one who matters. Be impassioned! It is okay to love your story, to need your story told. And if you need it told, someone out there needs to read it. Your ferocity is what’s going spark the connection between you and your reader, and that connection is vital.

Before I sign off, one final comment: neither these failures nor fears are referendums upon anyone’s character. The world is complex, as are individuals, and not every manuscript needs to be finished or need to be finished with the goal of publishing. Each of these fears or failures could have a hundred reasons for being, some of them excellent.

They’re simply reasons. The ‘why.’

But if you know why something is happening, you can fix it.

Flash (fiction) from the Past

This entry was tagged No writer is an island writing writs&arts and posted on by

Back when we started our Writing (and Art!) group, we decided to do a writing exercise where we all entered (or at least wrote for) the NPR Three-Minute Fiction challenge (Here’s the link to the one from… 2012). 2012! I not realize that our group has been around that long.

Anywhoodle, I wrote a smattering of entries for this, and the other day I was digging through my writing drawer and unearthed a couple that I’m rather fond of. Enjoy!

The prompt: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”

Story the First

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. First, though, she needed a door.

She kept watch over her shoulder as she sought the slender wire that would trail from door to spine. Careful not to disturb the book and alert her minders of what she was about to do, she slipped the wire into its fastening.

A small spark burned her fingers and the gray, blank wall resolved into the glass door she sought. It opened with a touch and she was through, lingering only long enough to hear the alarms as she stepped into the story. They couldn’t follow her here, not while she was inside of her favorite book where the grass felt warm like shredded paper, and she filled in details to make the world her own.

The flowers jostled for her attention, and while at first she imagined it the wind, her darker worries brought forth the creature. In a smooth pirouette with the blade now in her hands, she slashed the beast down the side to rain crimson on parchment leaves. This, then, was why the garden book was her favorite. It gave her the tools she needed to defeat the darkness.

Panting, she watched the beast regather for the second of three attacks. The bulk of its body was formless shadow, too many legs and not enough, and only the face held its shape between one glance and the next.

Seven dark reptilian eyes.

Many rows of many teeth.

The railing of angry orderlies came through the door, but they knew better than to interrupt. Breaking her concentration, her connection, would leave her here as they pulled her body through. Perhaps that was what the beast was, former wards and patients.

She met the second lunge with a shriek and her blade bit deep, as of its own accord, following the memories of her hands and the words on the page.

The last was always the worst and when it came at her, claws extended – claws from nowhere made of nothing – she only just avoided its slash. It preyed upon her anxiety, her fear of returning to the sterile world beyond the door. She fought her own thoughts. The creature grew in strength, winning as it never had before, as she feared to go back.

She could die here fighting, or die there staring at blank walls and blank faces. The creature read her reluctance and ate her right arm.

That was not part of the story, and it was only a story so there was no pain, but it reminded her that this was a temporary place, no matter how often she longed to visit. The beast fed on what she brought to the book, and every battle fell along different lines.

Her sword sliced its head off, vorpal or near to it, and she sat up as the fog of the creature burned away. She would return to the hospital this once, her courage restored, and when she could no longer take the prognosis and the plastered smiles, she would return for another round. Maybe then she would stay.

Comforted, she stood. White light shone through the door and, after a step, she paused to feel the stump where her arm ended. Familiar. The story was growing to reflect her reality, and while even a day ago she might have cried, now the thought made her smile.

She left the sword bleeding shadow on the paper grass.

Story the Second

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. As she stood, however, her first officer entered at a stumble, and dragged the door panel shut behind him. Panting, he held it closed with his full body weight, shoulders against the metal.

“Hounds after you, Nathanial?” She settled back into her chair, projecting calm she did not feel. The entire civilian council was waiting for her and while she could justify hiding for a few stolen moments to review procedure, she could hardly delay for anything less than a hull breach. A disciplinary hearing wasn’t something she should shirk.

“Captain.” Unfocused, he tried to catch his breath. “Captain.”

No salute. Her eyebrows rose as Nathanial’s attention focused on the door behind him. The man was scrupulously polite at the most inconvenient of times, and his lack of usual courtesies had her on feet before she took her next breath. “What’s wrong?”

“Na-Nancy.” He never called her by her first name while in uniform. “First Contact.”

She didn’t remember crossing the room, but his hand grasped hers as she lifted it activate the sensor. “Out of my way, Nate.”

“It’s not what we hoped.” He still wasn’t breathing right, every word a struggle. “This sector’s-”

“Hostiles.” Not a question. She stepped back and looked him up and down, only now seeing the smear of blood on panel behind him. “Nate.” Her admonition shifted quickly to concern as he fell forward, “You shouldn’t have come here.” She caught him before he hit the ground and reached up to key in the emergency lock-down.

“All business, Captain.” He told her as she tipped him forward to see the damage. Something sharp had caught him under the ribs in front and sliced around his torso to leave a gouge near his spine. “Ask.”

She stared hard at his face, pressing a flap of his uniform into his wound to stanch the bleeding. “Don’t do something foolish. Every life aboard this ship. Including yours.”

“Ask.” He repeated.

She tightened her jaw. “Stubborn. This isn’t the time,” she said before she started to ask.“Civilians?”

“Pods.”

“Vector?”

“Level six scow dock.”

She glanced up at the silent intercom system. “Computers?”

“Long story.”

Their question and answer, call and response, continued long enough for the plan to form and his color to worsen. Seconds only, but she felt time burning to ash the longer she waited. At least the perfunctory debriefing gave her the moments to find her med kit and the excuse to tend him before her duty required her.

She asked one last question as she slapped an injection patch onto his skin. “If I leave you, will you promise not to die?”

“No promises, Captain.”

“Don’t you dare.” She dropped a kiss onto to the top of his head and then helped him roll to a less painful position. The patch was already working, if the ugly colors creeping across his exposed muscle were any indication. “If you’re not here when I get back…” She left the threat unfinished as she collected her weapons and shields. Hefting the shortsword, she looked back at where Nathaniel had slipped into drug-induced unconsciousness.

Enough of this. Jamming the button on her collar with the butt of her sword, her vacuum helmet deployed. It would do well enough in combat, especially against something that used blades, claws, or both.

“Is it too much to ask for a First Contact to go smoothly?” As the visor slipped across her vision, she stalked out the door and into chaos.

 

If it’s important…

This entry was tagged journal ramble status check thoughts on life and posted on by

Let’s just say that this year has been epic, stressful, and full of ridiculous, massive changes in both my personal and professional life. If you had told me in January any of the stuff in my life right now would have come to pass, I might have laughed at you in disbelief.

So. Wow.

I apologize for being a bit vague. When I decided I wanted to a recap, I sort of forgot that I am shy and also private. Still, I can tell you about all the good stuff, like being a part of Pandamoon Publishing as their editorial coordinator, a shift which took me by surprise (to say the least). I also have more energy than I did at this time last year, thanks to more judicious managing of my mental weather, and even though I’m swamped with All The Things I Want To Do, that’s… really not a bad thing. Inspiration has snuck its way back into my life, too, and I’m working on projects that I’d either set aside or was allowing to percolate, and I am forging better relationships with my family and taking more action to accomplish my goals.

The frustrating and stressful stuff I want to leave behind with 2015, and even if they follow me, they’ll — of a necessity — be different than they were and hopefully more conquerable.

Part of why I think I’m had a pretty danged good year comes down to a single moment and, like all truly life-changing moments, it was brought about by a cat.

Over Thanksgiving in 2014, I brought home a cat from Colorado. Her name is Pica, and she’s probably the cutest cat on the planet. (Not that I’m biased.) I bring her up now because when I was trying to sort out the logistics to bring her back with me, my friend told me something that sort of settled in my bones. I was upset that he’d have to go to great lengths to get her her shots on short notice, and that it would be inconvenience and effort on his part because of something I’d done that could have been avoided if I’d gotten my act together earlier.

He said: If it’s important, it’s worth the inconvenience.

I’m probably paraphrasing a little, because time and turning it over and over in my head has polished it down. Those words — if it’s important… — stuck in my brain. If it’s important, it’s worth the obstacles. If it’s important, it’s worth the pain and inconvenience and dealing with your own failures. If it’s important, it’s worth making it work despite the hard stuff. Packed into ‘if it’s important’ is a wealth of meaning, about throwing yourself forward and picking yourself back up and taking action after action after action.

If it’s important, it’s worth the inconvenience.

There’s an underlying message of compassion in that, when said from one person to another, but I think I was struck most by the acknowledgement that important things are hard and sometimes those hard things are larger than just me. And, sometimes, in being larger than just me, they will leak out onto others, but that doesn’t make them any less important. Or any less worth it. Or my friends any less willing to help me make things happen.

What really gets me is that ‘inconvenience’ is never a factor for me when I try and help others, so I have no idea why the rules were different for me. Now that I know that they were, however, I’ve been working this past year on internalizing this idea of ‘if it’s important…’

I credit this handful of words with a lot of my drive in 2015. In evaluating what I found important, it made me make changes in my life that gave priority to the stuff I wanted to focus on, and helped me decide to live a little bit more outside of my head and in the real world where I can actually make a difference.

So here I sit, at the end of 2015, doing what I love, in a place I’ve made my home, with friends I held onto despite the distance, at the end of my first full year with the most adorable cat in the entire world.

And, friends, I believe that’s important.

Pica in a Box

So very important.

Note to Self: Take Better Notes

This entry was tagged journal ramble Novel WIP: WM? practicalities status check and posted on by

Today, I’m pissed off at myself.

Not for anything dire, luckily, but I’m still mad enough that I think I can get a blog post out of it. *grins*

I’ve been participating in #1LineWednesday on Twitter. It’s… run? Prompted? Encouraged? By RWA’s Kiss of Death twitter (@RWAKissOfDeath), and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve found more awesome people to follow through #1LineWednesday than I have doing anything else on twitter.

Yesterday’s theme (for the 21st) was ‘Last Lines of Chapters’, which – okay fair enough. The only problem is that recently I’ve been writing short stories, so I didn’t have a lot of ‘last lines’ to choose from. So I went spelunking into my dropbox where I keep my projects and skimmed through a few of my oldest novels. Good news: some of them aren’t awful and could probably stand to be reworked and finished! Bad news: none of them are finished, and some of them need a great deal of work.

Of particular note is that I found one of my old NaNoWriMo novels and started to skim it to find chapter ending lines. Cue me being a little floored, but it’s actually good? About halfway through skimming, I just straight-up started reading (and editing in my head, but mostly reading). I mean, there are some parts that straight-up suck, especially because I had no idea how to manipulate the tension I was building, and the prose is way too dense and heavily overwritten, and I’ve improved by leaps and bounds since I wrote it, but – ??? ??? ???

The reason I never finished it is because I’m more of a slow-and-steady writer, so that NaNoWriMo’s mad scramble for for 50k-in-a-month is just a little on the ’causes intense project burnout’ side of things. Also, I think I was mid-other-project and doing nano that year to figure out if I could write villains that didn’t suck so ‘finished project’ was a priority. But! For whatever reason, I tidied up my 50k, dropped the project in a metaphorical drawer, and never looked back.

The thing really cheeses me is that I stopped at the end of the ‘second act’ and wrote a paragraphless wall of words to explain the ending. It’s one page long, uses some sort of shorthand that I don’t provide the key for, and that’s it.

What was I thinking?!

How on earth did past me expect future me to sort out this block of unmitigated nonsense?!

I went to bed angry last night because why, why did I do this to myself. I knew for a fact that it was the most ‘solid’ book I’d written up to that point. Why. Whyyyyy.

It’s worse than just ‘I don’t know how to finish my book’, though.

Friends.

Friends.

This is a Time Travelling Serial Killer novel. A woman tries to rescue her brother from the killer’s clutches while time deteriorates and the past and future become unstable. There are at least four timelines and because of the ‘type’ of time travel I picked, my MC experiences linear personal time while the alternative timelines are created and destroyed around her. It’s very important for me to know what happens, when, on which day, in which timeline, and how the main character (who is also travelling in time, because, you know, why make it easy) experiences each event and in what order.

I need like 10x more notes than I have. What the heck am I supposed to do with lines like, ‘Dragons don’t have pockets!’ and ‘Remove the shark-jumping bits!’?

I’m so mad.

Friends. Take better notes than I do.

Especially when you’re writing about time travelling serial killers and stop (whyyyyyyyyy) just before you get to the good part.

Oversell in Fiction

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So. Oversell.

What is it, you ask, and why might I want to avoid it?

After a bit of judicious prodding, the internet spat back a few relevant definitions for oversell such as: “to be too eager or insistent in attempting to sell something” and “to make excessive claims”. For the most part, the word oversell is used in sales to describe ridiculous nonsense being claimed to try and sell a thing or the act of being super pushy and used-car-salesman-y. Or it’s used to warn interviewees away from making themselves sound too good to be true so that the interviewer’s bullshit meter starts to flash, or the new hire fails miserably because they promised all sorts of stuff they couldn’t do. I have no idea why, but for some reason, I yoinked the concept of oversell and applied it to writing fiction. (And if you find oversell by another name elsewhere with respect to writing, I’d love a link. :))

Oversell, how I use the term, is when you’re writing along (or editing along) and come across a phrase, sentence, or paragraph that pushes the idea you’re trying to convey to the point where it’s noticeable that you’re pushing. To use a movie analogy, oversell is the moment takes the movie past decently executed with purposeful cinematography and into the realm of obnoxious 3D fish flying from the screen to make you duck. Or that moment in Gravity where you go, “Oh, it’s a space womb,” or in the latter Matrix movies where you go, “Wow, crucifixion imagery and Messiah parallels. Thanks for that. Never would have caught that. Really.”

Oversell in fiction is similar. It’s explaining the joke, or stating outright the theme of your story as if your audience wouldn’t pick up on it otherwise. It’s that ‘extra’ little bit that makes the audience go ‘Alright already! We get it! Move on!’

Why you might want to avoid oversell:

There is no reason why you need to hand your audience/readers the answer. A sub-function of show-not-tell is the 2+2 principle.

The 2+2 principle is where you offer your readers all the pieces and let them put it together. The reader is the one who ultimately figures out that 2+2=4, and you never actually tell them that 4 is what you were aiming for.

This serves two purposes.

One, you’re not just handing them the conclusions you want them to reach. Not only are you exercising a narrative ‘tell’ by providing the conclusion, which leads to a flat narrative, your conclusion might not be the conclusions your reader would reach on their own, so then they feel like they’re being preached to. If you’ve ever read a review that called a book (or other piece of media) ‘preachy’, they’re talking, in part, about oversell.

The second purpose behind 2+2 is that, by handing them pieces and requiring your reader to reach a conclusion, your reader now must invest some small amount of effort and brainpower into their reading experience. As a result, you’ve set your reader up to get that tiny rush of satisfaction in the ‘click’ moment. Terry Pratchett’s books are absolutely boss at utilizing the 2+2 principle. Any book with a really brilliant ‘oh shit’ or ‘oh my god’ or reveal moment has succeeded in giving you all the pieces and then providing you with the opportunity to put them all together.

Oversell overrides 2+2. While you still may be showing the answer (in a show-not-tell sense), you’re also showing the answer, which is the opposite of what you want.

In a more practical sense, oversell is also just pointless extra words. You’ve already made your point, you don’t need to make it again. Half of presenting an idea or an argument or a piece of creative work is knowing when to cut and run.

Last – er – maybe it’s just me, but oversell (in the most egregious examples) is super annoying. I have a gut ‘don’t tell me what to do’ reaction. There is a sense, like I said above, of ‘I get it already! Just keep going! We don’t need to dwell!’ combined with a ‘well, I was on board before, but now you ruined it.’

I don’t get annoyed by small bits of oversell, though. Partially, that’s because I’m super guilty of oversell in my own work, and I mostly catch it during the editing phase. The part of it is that I see it all the time in published works. It’s where an author just goes notion too far before moving on. It’s common and, to be honest, most of the time it’s not glaringly obvious. When I’m being a Reader (rather than an Editor), oversell is one of those things that becomes a nuance. It disappears into the work, for the most part, same as weird names or other small decisions that don’t impact the story so much as the telling of it. A good story can make up for a multitude of tiny imperfections.

Plus! Sometimes oversell can be a trick in and of itself, like when explaining the joke is the joke (Link is Dr. Horrible. Slightly nsfw, heh.), but most of the time you’re undermining your own piece by not letting it stand on its own merits.

Last thing: don’t let a worry that you’re overselling stop you from writing. Oversell is an editing-level concern. Even if you’re a one-pass gut-level writer who never changes a single word you write (except typos), oversell is very easy to fix. 99% of the time you can simply cut out the line or the paragraph entirely and the work is not just unchanged, it’s stronger. Sometimes, too, you can’t tell where you’re trying too hard until you read the whole thing through after you’re done.

Above all, though, don’t be afraid to let your work stand on its own. Trust your words will lead the reader to the conclusion you want, and you’ll avoid a lot of oversell.

The Dulcet Tones of Genre Convention

This entry was tagged craft abstractions genre talk theory & mechanics theory & meta writerly process and posted on by

I’ve been squirreling away blogpost seeds for ages, and it occurred to me that there’s no point in hoarding them if I never use them.

So! Today was prompted by an io9 article from, oh, July 15th, 2013. Ahem.

In this io9 article entitled ‘What does it mean when people say your story’s “tone” is wrong?’, there’s a fairly good breakdown of what tone even is. The definition it settles on is something along the lines of the mix of emotion, atmosphere, genre convention, authorial voice and style that creates the experiential landscape of the prose. More or less. The author, Anders, relates the idea of tone to music (logically enough), and how the whole of a musical piece and the resultant emotional impact is dependent on the sum of its mechanical parts. That’s a fairly good definition of tone, as far as trying to define something so subjective as to how a particular piece of art might feel to an audience.

To put it even more simply: Tone is the gestalt of how a writer conveys events and experiences.

Tone is also a tool, which is what I think the io9 article touches on but doesn’t necessarily drive home. It’s not something that just sort of happens as a result of style/voice/etc. and it’s something you can manipulate. In conveying ideas while aiming for a specific tone, a writer can influence a reader towards emotion, towards expectation, and play with different kinds of tension, among other things. Most writer’s tools are also fractal-like, where each component part is made up of different, other tools, which are made up of others, which are made up of others and so on from deciding who your main character has to be to tell the story you want all the way down to the actual, physical arrangement of words on a page. Even just coloring text or blacking out a page can have an effect on the tone, like in House of Leaves or the Series of Unfortunate events, respectively. Tone is no exception, and I consider it one of the more abstract tools a writer can utilize, which means there’s an infinite fractal contained inside.

So. If tone is a megatool and each subtool consists of a set of choices in how to present ideas, then ultimately tone becomes a matter of tiny choices. And following the idea of choice, even a short list off possible choices reads like the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch, where every iteration has a new item to consider. For example, amongst our weaponry (with respect to tone), there’s the choice of diction and the choice of structure and the choice what to describe (out of all the possibilities) and the choice of whose opinion the narrative is reinforcing and the choice of when to reveal twists and the choice of when to increase tension and the choice of how long or short sentences are and and and…

If ‘possible choices that impact the tone of a story’ were turtles, it’s turtles all the way down.

So, sometimes a writer just hasn’t considered enough turtles, simply through lack of practical experience, and the tone of a work will reflect that. The tone could be ‘wrong’, as in the io9 article above, or it could simply be bland. A just-the-facts-ma’am mechanical tone that is otherwise absolutely correct with respect to the basic choices of grammar, syntax, and idea conveyance can make an otherwise exciting story very boring. Boring is the kiss of death. It’s this complete lack of tone, rather than a work having the wrong tone, that I consider the reason why most people’s work ends up being passed over, be it fanfiction or a self-published work trying to stand out from the crowd or a manuscript angling to be traditionally published out on query.

And, even better, sometimes in trying to tackle a change in tone a writer (like me) will discover that there are way, way too many turtles. I actually consider ‘too many turtles’ a type of writer’s block that, when confronted with the sheer gonzo number of choices to be made when working with tone, where literally every word can be deliberately placed to provide a certain effect, a writer can get blocked by something between ‘analysis paralysis’, ‘choice overload’, and ‘tyranny of small decisions’, where there are simply too many decisions to make, too many options for each decision, and each of decision influences the whole on a chaos theory level where even a tiny change might propagate to fundamentally alter the entire final product. Yikes.

Insert genre.

The io9 article linked above points out that genres all have their own distinct tone, whether it’s dark or light or sexy or suspenseful or epic or something else entirely, and that reading in your preferred genre is the best way to absorb the tone. I agree, and in spades, because what a writer learns from absorbing the tone of a particular genre is all the myriad different genre conventions that form that genre. Genre convention makes certain choices in structure and how for you, which feeds into tone. With that, genre becomes a powerful tool in a writer’s toolbox, because its conventions break your turtles into manageable hordes.

For the most basic of basic examples, convention for a book in the romance genre is that the conflict with be romantic in nature. If the writer’s genre of choice is romance, this gives a boundary and a framework, limiting the number of turtles they have to wrangle to ‘how to write a specifically romantic conflict’. The terms are set, and it’s a narrow enough area that it gives somewhere to grip in the attempt to gain mastery over the form. The end goal is defined (these idiots fall in love), the conflict is defined (these idiots have hang-ups that prevent them from falling in love), and the rest is nuance and detail and complication that makes each romance unique. Tone, here, will end up having elements of suspense, angst, and interpersonal tension. It will feel like a romance novel.

In this particular example, genre defines tone. Tone, however, can also turn around define genre conventions. If you want something to encourage a lot of tension and have a very action-oriented sort of tone, you can put a time limit on it (race-the-clock conventions in spy thrillers), or have the story build up to a do-or-die event (sports and heist stories), or have the stakes be astronomical (superhero and most fantasy). You can make decisions about what genre you want to utilize by examining what sort of tone would be ideal for your story, reading within a genre that has that tone, and stealing the conventions–or, more precisely, the techniques that those conventions are made of. There’s nothing that says a writer can’t make use of other people’s turtles to help create something entirely their own.

Meandering aside, I just want reiterate that tone and genre (and genre’s ever-so-useful genre conventions) are all tools to tailor a reader’s experience. I know I’m repeating myself, but this cannot be stated strongly enough. I think, too often, that there can be a sense that tone (and to some extent genre) is something that simply arises from the process of bringing a bookbaby into the world. Tone is a tool! If someone tells you your tone is wrong, or it’s bland and your writing is mechanical, ask yourself: what tone am I aiming for? Hopefully that’s a question that will give you ideas of what sort of turtles you want to be looking for.

Good luck with your tones, and happy turtle hunting!

Dancing in September

This entry was tagged status check and posted on by

The reasons for my radio silence the past month-and-some-change have been myriad and of varying levels of ‘excuse’. August, however, was slam-chocked full of travel. First weekend was a wedding in which I was maid of honor (Hi, Kimi! Congrats! I hope wedded bliss is treating you well!), the next weekend was a funeral for the boyfriend’s grandfather (15 hour round trip in the car), and then a week and a half ago I spent the week with my grandma after a thankfully brief medical scare (she’s fine, whew). I haven’t been home a lot, and when I have, I’ve been working on a novel edit. There will be announcements at some point. Eventually.

Suffice it to say that I have been obscenely busy, and when I edit I slip into tunnel-vision-mode and drop off the face of the planet. Here I am crawling back on-planet and maybe dancing a little because my month of Going Everywhere and Doing Everything is over.

Your regularly unscheduled writing-related posts will (hopefully) recommence sometime this week.