Scott William Carter

• There’s nothing better than listening to an author you enjoy read his or her own work — if that author knows how to read for an audience.   I’m currently listening to Neil Gaiman’s M is for Magic on my MP3 player, and he really does bring his fiction to life.  Gotta love that English accent, too.   
• If you’re a serious writer who needs help getting your craft to a publishable level, or even a professional writer whose career has stagnated, then you really should check out the workshops taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith here on the Oregon coast.  Every few years, they do a slate of workshops, and they’re in one of those phases now.  They’re pros, having made their living from their writing most of their adult lives, and so you’ll be learning from people who have actually walked the path.  I can’t recommend them enough.  Be forewarned, however:  they’re not for the faint of heart.  You should only consider attending if you’re serious about writing commercial fiction — and by commercial, I mean fiction aimed at reaching the widest audience possible.
• Check out the The First Book blog.  Sara Hantz is up with her book, The Second Virginity of Suzy Green.  A snippet:  “I’d been writing chick-lit for a couple of years, when in November 2005 I decided to try a teen-lit. After writing 3 chapters I did what you’re not meant to do and started to send it to agents, to test the water. Ooops!!! That’ll teach me. The story seemed to hit the right nerve because straight away five agents asked for the full manuscript and six for partials.”

Two minor things for a cold and damp Friday afternoon here in the Willamette Valley:

• If you’re into the social networks, check out my Myspace and Facebook pages.  And add me as a friend, if you like.  I doubt I’ll ever be as into these things as some people are, but with a book coming out down the road, I’ve been trying to put a little more effort into my Internet presence.  And it can never hurt to have a few more friends, can it?  Well, unless you’re someone like this guy.
• Check out the First Book Blog:  the focus is on James Van Pelt, and his book Summer of the Apocalypse.  Van Pelt’s a great example of someone who used a quality small press — rather than a big NY publisher — to great effect.

A few minor things:

• I’ve decided to do an Internet Fast for three weeks, which is basically limiting my personal Internet time to less than fifteen minutes a day. Some mental toxins have crept into my system, and this is my way of clearing them out. The fifteen minutes will mostly be spent checking email and keeping up with writing-related business, but it will also be a challenge to see how much I can keep up on with those fifteen minutes. I’ve been doing it for a few days already, and it’s been good, but it is a challenge even dealing with all my email in that time.
• I turned in the mini-collection to PS Publishing: A Web of Black Widows and Other Stories of Love and Loss. Thirty thousand words. Six stories — four or which are original to the collection. Right now it’s scheduled for an early 2009 release, but we’ll see. I’ll be posting a page with more information about the collection in the coming months.
• Check out the First Book blog: Jennifer E. Smith and The Comeback Season.
• Read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Hugo-nominated novella, “Recovering Apollo 8,” for free over at Asimov’s. Wonderful story. Plus if you want to see how a great writer can break the rules (not that there is such a thing in fiction), this is a good one to study. There’s only a few scenes and much of it is told in narrative summary, with the first third almost entirely exposition, but it works beautifully.  It works because it gives you a sense of a small story within the larger scope of history, which was the right tone and approach.

One of my frustrations the last couple years has been how hard it is finding time to read.  Any writer (heck, anyone) with young children can probably relate — there’s just not enough hours in the day anymore.  But a writer needs to read as much as he or she needs to write — it’s the creative fuel that keeps the fires of the imagination burning.

I’ve always liked audio books as a way to squeeze in more reading, but now that my daughter, Kat, accompanies me out to the university (where she goes to preschool), listening to them in the car isn’t much of an option.  Usually, we end up listening to one of her CDs:  “Head . . . and shoulders, knees, and toes, knees and toes . . .”   

I’ve had an iPod for a while now, but purchasing audio books is expensive and importing CDs checked out from the library is too time-consuming.  So I was happy when I stumbled across the Library2Go program, which allows library patrons to “check out” audio books to be downloaded to computers and MP3 players.  The iPod wasn’t compatible, so I sprung for the $35 (man, have the prices come down on these things) for a 1 gig Sansa.  I’ve been using it on my walks at lunch here at the day job, and it’s been great so far — tiny, easy to use, and even the 1 gig player fits three to four books at a time.   

While I’ve never been one to get excited about technology for technology’s sake — it’s always about what technology can do that matters to me — I have to say this has me pretty stoked. 

Had a great time attending the Denise Little workshop on the Oregon coast this past weekend. Since Kris and Dean hadn’t done any workshops in several years, it was like a reunion for many of us, though I met plenty of new folks, too. Among those in attendance were Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Phaedra Weldon, Steve Mohan Jr., Ken Scholes, Adrian Phoenix, Peter Orullian, Loren Coleman . . . the list goes on an on.  A very talented bunch.

That’s one of the reasons I like Kris and Dean’s workshops so much. It’s not just the teachers (who are fabulous). It’s the students. There’s nothing better than being surrounded by a lot of writers who treat the craft as seriously as you do. Believe me, that’s a rare thing. The focus was on writing for anthologies, and I certainly learned a lot about that, but I also got a reminder on a very important lesson — one that I needed right now.

Everybody’s got excuses not to write. Everybody’s got excuses not to meet a deadline — whether it’s in a workshop or in real life. But no matter how good your excuse is, there’s always another writer who’s got a better one, and they met their deadline. So when I hear myself trying to reach for an excuse, and I’ve certainly got plenty of good ones (a day job, two young children, etc.), I’m going to ask myself if I want to be one of those people who uses excuses as justification for not writing, or instead one of those people who does the work anyway and then uses those challenges as a bragging point. “Hey look,” you can say, “I was sick as a dog and my bank just called to say I’m bouncing checks, but I still wrote ten pages.”

That’s not say some excuses are good reasons to not write — there’s plenty of awful things I can imagine happening that would stop me from writing. It’s just that it’s always my choice whether I allow them to stop me or not.

On another note: go check out The First Book blog. Up today, Kelly Simmons and her book, Standing Still. A snippet: “I’ve never been one of those people who has to have a certain kind of pen, or notebook, or desk. If I’d waited to have all the right things I’d never have written a word.”

I’m about to head out to the Oregon coast for a writing workshop I’ve been looking forward to for some time.  The very talented Denise Little of Tekno Books will be leading a workshop on writing for anthologies.  It will also be a chance to catch up with many talented writers, many whom I’ve known for years.

But before I go, I thought I’d try to start something new, a Friday post on interesting things I bumped into over the course of the week.  Here you go:

• Up on The First Book blog this week:  Mark Henry, and his novel Happy Hour of the Damned
• “Are Women Human?” And other publishing highlights.  I especially liked this book title:  How to Write a How to Write Book.
• John Scalzi’s Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money.  Some ponts worth pondering.  He’s surprisingly frank about how much he’s made and where his income has come from.
• My agent, Rachel Vater, has some interesting posts on the value a website has for a professional writer — even an aspiring one.  Here and Here.

My sister tipped me off to a great article on why novel publishing can be so slow — sometimes taking several years, from when an agent sells a manuscript, before a book sees print.  Well worth the read:  “Waiting for It,” at the NY Times.

I just received word from Weird Tales that my story, “Directions to Mourning’s Deep,” certainly one of the strangest and shortest stories I’ve written (only a couple of pages, and written in second person), is scheduled to appear in the April/May issue. They’ve done a major revamp of the magazine, and in honor of this, they’re doing a subscription drive in which you can get six issues (a full year) for a mere $12. A fantastic deal. If you like weird fiction, take advantage of it. Here’s a shot of the new cover:

Also, you may have noticed a few changes to the website. I decided that the old site needed a little revamp, and since my day job is working in instructional technology for a university, it was a good excuse to learn a little more about PHP, CSS, and other geekery, things I needed to learn anyway to help faculty and students. I wanted to better embed my blog on my site as well as take advantage of tools which allow me to have the same content appear on multiple pages without actually having to update that content on every page. I’m still by no means a professional web designer, and it’s still not exactly what I want, but I’m happy with the progress. Probably more small tweaks, as time allows.

Took a two-week whirlwind road trip with my wife, seeing Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, a tiny bit of Texas, and a chunk of southern California. The initial excuse was to see the Grand Canyon, which neither of us had seen before, but we also saw a number of other national parks: Crater Lake (we’d been there before, but always love seeing it), Lassen National Park, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, and Carlsbad Caverns among them. We made a stop in San Diego, staying at a nice resort on Mission Bay called Paradise Point, and then capped off our trip with a day at Disneyland. Highlights also included: stopping in Rachel, Nevada, ten miles from Area 51, after our car was attacked by a swarm of grasshoppers; horseback riding in Red Canyon; watching 400,000 bats make their nightly exit out of a cave one night short of a full moon; and buying our ticket to the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico from the man who started it: Lt. Walter Haut, the public information officer in the Air Force ordered to release the press release saying the government had, indeed, recovered an alien spacecraft in 1947 (only to have him later ordered to retract it). Recent good reads: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and Mr. Paradise by Elmore Leonard. Sebold’s was interesting because of the point of view, the fourteen year old main character essentially a ghost who follows what happens to her family and friends after her murder (I’m not giving anything away here, because the murder happens in the opening pages) — which, from a writer’s point of view, is a nifty way of being able to tell a story from an omniscient point of view. Paradise had all the things that make Leonard fun — great dialog, snappy writing, colorful characters — but I don’t think it’s one of his better books. It’s already starting to fade in my mind.

Not much writing done during the trip, but it’s slowly coming back up to speed. Taking a week off next week from the day job to do some marathon writing, which should be interesting. It’s the third draft of a young adult fantasy I’m trying to get right, making it easier to put in some long days (since I know the story), but I’ve never done more than two marathon days in a row before (which I define as writing for at least eight hours a day). See how it goes.

I had never read any John Irving so I thought I’d give him a shot. I was aware of his work from the books that were turned into movies (The Cidar House Rules, The World According to Garp), but we all know that watching a movie adapted from a book and reading the book itself are two completely different experiences. My wife had recently read A Widow for One Year and heartily recommended it, so I thought I’d pick up the paperback and give him 50 pages (my standard for trying out a new author). I was pleasantly surprised.

One of the qualities I strive for in my own writing is to make it relentlessly readable. I don’t always succeed, but accessibility–meaning, the ease at which the reader is pulled into and through the story–is very important to me. I’m also acutely aware of it when reading others.

One of the masters is, of course, Stephen King. If you haven’t read him before, you really should, and don’t be put off by his reputation as a horror writer. True, he’s written lots of horror, but his writing is a lot more diverse than that. Try Bag of Bones, one of his recent novels, which mixes suspense, romance, and even a bit of the John Grisham legal thriller, or his most recent story collection, Everything’s Eventual. There’s masterful writing in both that novel and the short stories.

John Irving’s one of those writers, just like Stephen King. He meanders frequently, and there were times that I was tempted to skim, but I never did because I was afraid I’d miss something good. Definitely a master storyteller.

Other great recent reads: L.A. Dead by Stuart Woods (good, pulpy mystery and A Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg (unapologetically sentimental, but I’ve always been a sucker for a good sentimental story.