wshaffer

Of all the things I've ever published, my poem, "Icarus", originally published in Strange Horizons in 2000, is the one that seems to generate the most continued interest. I still get the odd email about it from time to time. It's also been reprinted at least 3 times: in the first Best of Strange Horizons anthology, on a website devoted to different artistic interpretations of the Daedalus and Icarus myth, and in an English textbook for high school students in Australia.

Now I've gotten a request to reproduce the poem as part of an assessment test for students in Michigan. I feel kind of weird having written something that's apparently so tailor-made for school assignments, but since part of what I was trying to capture in the poem was the recklessness of adolescence/early adulthood, I guess it fits?

Just a reminder for writers out there who might be looking to get some feedback on a manuscript: the FOGcon writing workshop is open for sign-ups until Feb. 1. The writing workshop is something people really enjoy, and I know some people who come to FOGcon just to participate in it. You'll get a critique of your manuscript from a professional instructor and a small group of your peers. I don't think this year's instructors have been determined yet, but in the past we've had such cool people as Cassie Alexander, Marie Brennan, and David Levine.

Want more details? Find 'em here: http://fogcon.org/writing-workshop/

Let's see...picking up after my last update, I met up with my coauthor on Wednesday night and we discussed revisions to the first of our two screenplays. Thursday was hectic, and I didn't manage any work on the screenplays. Friday night I managed a page or two on Screenplay #2, and today I wrote a whopping 9 pages.

I've sent the partial draft of Screenplay #2 to my coauthor, and am now turning to revise Screenplay #1, which we've completed a full draft of. Wheee!

As usual, my write-a-thon page is here: http://www.clarionwest.org/writeathon/wendyashaffer

My Clarion West write-a-thon page is here: http://www.clarionwest.org/writeathon/wendyashaffer. Donations gratefully accepted. No amount is too small!

Did 2 pages of screenplay yesterday in before catching the train up to San Francisco to see Cliff Winnig, Cassie Alexander, and Heather McDougal read at SF-in-SF. I really ought to make it up to SF-in-SF more often. The readings are always good, and I'm pretty much guaranteed to bump into people that I know and don't get to see as often as I'd like.

Today I was pushing hard to see if I could get to the end of Act Two. And I didn't quite make it, but I did write 6 pages. This is a rather info-dumpy sequence, and I've been working hard to make the dialogue flow rather than just putting long speeches on the page. And trying very hard to make maximum use of visuals. Probably not entirely successfully, but I do feel like my grasp of screenwriting idiom is improving.

So, 8 pages total this weekend. Not a bad start.

I wrote a remarkably effective* flirtation scene last night in the work in progress. Only problem is, it was between my protagonist and the elf she's not supposed to be attracted to**.

[Elf Dude]***, step up your game. You've got competition.

At least my human love interest is staying in the game by being awkwardly sweet, which is one of the few areas in which a 15-year-old boy can trump an elf hands down. (Elves never do anything awkwardly, and most of them can't manage "sweet" to save their lives.)

*"Remarkably effective" in this context may mean "didn't make me cringe". Jeez, teen romance is hard.

**"Not supposed to be attracted to" in relative terms, admittedly. All the elves in this book are sexy.

***No, he still doesn't have a name. Which really would hamper anyone's flirtation skills.

So, I've just passed 100 long-hand pages written in the current novel-in-progress, a.k.a Summoner (serious working title), a.k.a How I Went to Elf Camp and Didn't Get Laid (snarky working title). That probably works out to roughly 20,000 words. What particularly pleases me is that I've made it this far without getting bored or completely running out of plot ideas, which is what has happened at about 10,000 to 15,000 words in to every previous novel I've attempted, including a previous incarnation of Summoner.

I'm not sure if I've matured as a writer, or if I've just developed more sheer bloody-minded determination. Or if there's a difference.

My coworkers have started to notice my habit of using my lunch breaks to work on my novel. One of them is now writing poetry on her lunch breaks. This is kind of awesome.

Also, I need to make more time to type up my drafts. I've got maybe 300 words of this transcribed to a text file. I really shouldn't wait until I've drafted the whole darn thing to type the rest.

Also, I suck at names. 20,000 words in, two significant characters appear in the text only as "[Elf Dude]" and "[Bad Elf]".

So, most of you have already seen Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith's post, Say Yes to Gay YA, in which they describe how an agent offered them representation for their YA novel on the condition that they either make a gay POV character straight or remove his POV from the book. I'd been intending to make a post about this myself, except that I hadn't thought of much to say beyond, "Really? Shit like this happens in 2011?" and perhaps to witter a bit about my current thoughts on the sexual orientation of characters in my current work-in-progress. (One of the major male characters may be bisexual. I'm not entirely certain at this point if I as the writer haven't figured out his sexuality or if he as the character hasn't figured out his sexuality.)

But now Colleen Lindsay has posted a guest post by Joanna Stampfel-Volpe, who claims to be the agent in question. And the way she tells it, she asked for the character's sexuality to be toned down because she wanted the book to be revised to target the middle-grade market, which meant that everyone's sexuality needed to be toned down; and she suggested cutting down on a couple of the POV characters, because there were too many POVs.

I'll admit, there were enough simple factual discrepancies between Brown and Smith's account and Stampfel-Volpe's that my first thought was that maybe she wasn't actually the agent in question. However, Sherwood Smith has confirmed that she is.

So, now we're left with something that illustrates one of my favorite intellectual obsessions: that human communication is complicated. The gap between what one party thought they said and what the other party heard is huge. On the one hand, it's worth noting that just because Stampfel-Volpe presents very plausible seeming editorial reasons for the requested revisions, doesn't mean that bias wasn't a factor. In this day and age, bias, particularly unconscious bias, usually cloaks itself as a reasonable objection. Just as an analogy, if you look at employment discrimination against women in technical fields, female candidates are rarely explicitly rejected because they are female. They get rejected because there's some minor gap in their technical skills that would be overlooked if they were male, or because they just don't seem like good personality fit with the rest of the team, or whatever.

On the flip side, authors obviously have tremendous psychological incentive to dismiss criticism of their work by attributing it to bad motives. Neither Brown nor Smith are noobs at this writing business, so I wouldn't expect them to fall prey to this kind of thing easily, but we all have our blind spots and bad days.

All the parties involved have asked that people focus on the bigger and important issue of gay representation in YA fiction rather than taking sides. But since the whole question of "How is it that there is so frequently a gigantic gap between what people think they say and what other people hear?" is a recurring obsession of mine, I had to comment on that aspect briefly.

As for the bigger issue: Write stories with gay characters. Read stories with gay characters. Talk about
stories with gay characters. Have I missed anything?

Edited to add: as confirmed in the comments over on swan_tower's excellent post on the subject, Joanna Stampfel-Volpe was, in fact, not the agent in question, but works at the same agency and, I guess, was privy to the discussions to some degree. Which...well, let me put it this way - if it's easy to deceive yourself about your own motivations, it's even easier to put the best possible spin on the words and actions of a colleague whose professional reputation you're defending. I'm now more certain than I was before that Stampfel-Volpe is telling the truth as she understands it, but much less certain that her account really reflects what happened during those discussions.

So, Big Finish have announced the winner of their 5th Doctor script pitch opportunity. It's a script by Rick Briggs. No relation to Nick Briggs. Congrats to Rick Briggs!

I would have been thrilled if they'd commissioned my script, but wasn't really expecting it. I think I had higher hopes for my entry in their Short Trips short story competition, but that wasn't selected either. Ah well, I had so much fun with both entries (especially the script pitch) that I can't complain.

Plus, all this rejection is making me feel like a real writer. Time to get together something else to submit and have rejected!

So, I'm working right now on a short story for Big Finish's Short Trips submission opportunity, featuring the 3rd Doctor and Liz Shaw. Which means that I am writing a strange kind of historical fiction, because during that period of the show, the TARDIS was inoperable and the Doctor was basically stuck in 1970. [Well, okay - old school fans reading this will know that there's tremendous controversy over when those stories were actually supposed to have taken place, because they do feature things like manned British missions to Mars, which weren't remotely a possibility in 1970. But, despite occasional very striking anachronisms, the stories of that era generally reflect the technology, social attitudes, and fashion sense of the year they were broadcast.]

I've written historical fiction before, but I've never before written historical fiction set in an era where some potential readers might actually remember the era in question. Fortunately, it's only a 2500 word story with a fairly circumscribed plot and setting, so I don't think there's too much scope for egregious error.

The historical setting does creep in in interesting ways, though. I wrote a description of an alien communication device as "an oblong of dark plastic with buttons on it." Then I thought, "Okay, I've just described a cell phone. Why don't I just say, 'it looked like a cell phone'?" With the answer being, of course, that Liz in 1970 wouldn't know what a cell phone was. (And if she did, she'd call it a mobile. But I digress.)

It does make me wonder - if people in 2050 write Doctor Who stories set in 2010, will it be recognizable as our 2010? What sorts of things will people get wrong?

I must be feeling contrarian today, because people all over twitter are gushing about the new Doctor Who trailer, and I actually think it's kind of lame. Not lame in an "Oh-my-god-Moffatt's-ruining-my-show-I'm-never-watching-again" kind of way, just kind of silly. Though I will say, the more I see of Matt Smith in the role, the more I like him. So in that sense, the trailer did it's job.

In further contrariness, many of the rules in this Guardian list of rules for writing made me want to stab either myself or somebody else with a pen. Particularly Elmore Leonard's rules, which seem to be good rules if you want to write like Elmore Leonard. Which is fair enough, I suppose - when giving advice about writing, one can only really be authoritative on how to write like oneself. There are lots of nuggets of good advice scattered though this article, as well as part two, though a lot of it won't be new unless you're not in the habit of reading writing advice. I was particularly amused by Phillip Pullman's contribution:

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.

There's always one, isn't there?