On August 12, 1971, my 16-year-old self mailed the first story I ever wrote off on its first submission. The publication I hoped would buy that story, my dream market, was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
[...]
...earlier this week, after what by my count were 23 back and forth emails between me and the new owners of F&SF as I attempted to transform that initial boilerplate contract into something acceptable, I had no choice other than to walk away from my dream.
Let me explain why.
But before I do, I want to preface this by making it clear I have nothing but good things to say about editor Sheree Renée Thomas. Her words of praise as she accepted this story moved me greatly, and her perceptive comments and suggested tweaks ably demonstrated her strengths as an editor. It breaks my heart to disappoint her by pulling a story which was intended to appear in the next issue of F&SF. But, alas, I must.
Short version: Must Read Magazines offers garbage contracts. I'm not in contracts or law, but I started in sf/f short stories 20+ years ago and IMO Edelman correctly refused to sign.
Based on this account and others, I would not go near Must Read Magazines (or F&SF, Asimov's, Analog under their current ownership) with a 200-foot anaconda, let alone a 20-foot pole.
Welcome to everyone joining us for the Year-End Marathon and to everyone looking for a peek behind the curtain at GYWO. Each month volunteers post discussions about writing craft, life, and publishing. This rare public post is to give a taste of the full GYWO experience. We welcome you to interact, comment, and share your own experiences on the topic.
Establishing a Writing Routine
The idealized writing routine looks something like this:
make a cup of tea or coffee while getting in a creative mindset
sit down to free write with a fountain pen as a warmup
light a candle or incense to draw the muse and other creative spirits
put on the perfect music or silence, as needed
get comfortable and write 1,000 or 2,000 words in an hour or so
Mmm, sounds nice, doesn't it? That aesthetic set up is absolutely the ideal. It feels more writerly and like it’s what’s missing from our writing lives. If only we could free write with a fountain pen, light a candle, and be blessed by the muse with inspiration to write for an hour. If that, then we could be successful and productive writers.
But writing routines are not that idealized or consistent. Writing routines have to fit around real lives and incorporate personal quirks. Writing routines are not one-size-fits-all and they must be flexible so you can write on days when you’re busy, tired, or just not feeling it.
Writing routines won’t make you write, but they can help you find your way to words.
What Does a Real Writing Routine Look Like?
Probably the best way to figure out what writing routines look like is by examining an actual routine that works for someone. So, mine, heh. Let's talk about my writing routine on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the days when I write with a fairly steady schedule.
Three days a week, I meet with 2–3 members of my in-person writing group on Discord for a mid-day write-in.
Prep Time: My writing prep starts about an hour before when I eat lunch, take a break, and let my mind rest and switch tasks. I usually watch a TV show and play a phone game. I make sure to choose a show that won’t adversely affect my writing, specifically by making me want to watch the next episode, flail about it with a friend, or otherwise pull my thoughts away from writing.
I then check-in with the other writers who join me. This is when we confirm attendance or delays to our normal start time. Then I clean up from lunch, make tea, and open my files.
Hopefully I also have time to clean up my file from the previous writing session and get a grip on what I need to work on today, which usually includes rereading the last couple paragraphs in a scene or notes I made about what comes next. If I run out of time, I finish my prep in the first 5–10 minutes of our first sprint.
Writing: I have a desk in my home office where I write. Aside from my laptop and/or iPad (and various desk fidgets), I try to clear my desk except for my tea, phone, project notebook, and a set of colored pens. (Sometimes I clear my desk by setting things out of sight on the floor.)
I set the timer for our first sprint and get to work.
We usually write for three 20-minute sprints, giving about an hour of writing time over an hour-and-a-half period. We report what we worked on, complain about various things (including how mushy our brains are), and share pictures of our cats.
Wrap Up: By the end of the third sprint, I’m usually done writing for the day. If I’m really on a roll, I might continue long enough to finish a conversation, but if it feels like it will take longer than about 10 minutes, I jot some notes about what comes next and trust I’ll be able to pick up where I left off the next day.
At that point, writing time is done and I move on to other things I need to do with my day.
How Do You Make A Routine Happen?
The writing routine I described above happens in a group. Meeting with a group is a great way to establish a writing routine. When you make a plan to meet with others, you are more likely to show up than if you just tell yourself that you’re supposed to write at noon.
You know how I know that? Because the days of the week when I don’t write with other people, I don’t write on a schedule. I do write, but I fit it in wherever makes sense in my day, which means on a very busy day, I’m squeezing in words at the last possible second. (Not my best choice.)
Routines also happen when you take similar steps to get there. The whole “routine” part is that you have a consistent set of actions that lead you to writing. You may not need lunch + break + tea before writing, but a series of steps before writing that can become your pre-writing routine can help you get there.
You know how I know that? Most days if I follow lunch with tea, I sit down to write. My brain has associated mid-day tea with writing, so it’s become an easy way to get my brain to shift into the writing gear. (It’s also a way for me to tell my brain to shift into writing. If I want to write and have been dancing around it, if I make a cup of tea, it’s a short-cut to my brain being able to settle.)
The other Big Secret to a writing routine is figuring out what works for you. While tea and a writing group work best for me, maybe you need something different. Maybe your routine is:
Make Breakfast + Notebook to Freewrite
Take Shower + Let Hair Dry + Write 20 Minutes
Walk to Park + Eat Lunch + Write 15 Minutes
Pick Up Kids + Fix Snacks + Write While Helping with Homework
Everyone Else In Bed + Write Until Sleepy
Your routine can be whatever helps you get to writing, so figure out what works for you and is something you can achieve—whether that’s daily or a handful of times a week. Remember, routines can be adjusted for specific days (my MWF routine is different from other days) or you might have a routine for Busy Days that’s different from your routine for Extremely Busy Days. As long as you have your own secret to get you writing, you have a routine.
Think about what you did the last time you sat down to write, is that your writing routine? Do you think something might work better for you?
Information is the name of the game, and today’s Big Idea has a lot of it! From quantum mechanics to Diet Coke, author Stewart Hotston takes you on a ride through how the galaxy works, and how his new novel, Project Hanuman, came to be.
STEWART HOTSTON:
My fate was sealed in Leicester Square, London when I was six years old and I was taken to see Return of the Jedi. That was the day I fell in love with Space Opera.
From then on, I was a big fan – going so far as to get my PhD in theoretical physics, before ditching academia for ‘a real job’ as my grandmother declared. Over the years I’ve learned to keep my opinions about science fiction to myself – not least because I realise that pointing at a movie in outrage and screaming ‘that’s not how angular momentum works!’ is fun for exactly no one including me. It really isn’t how angular momentum works though.
Instead I’m going to enjoy the story, accept the nonsense for dramatic licence and try not to remind anyone that we’re unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
Honestly, most of the time I’m happy someone made some science fiction at all.
Many of us have some idea of just how weird it would be to be close to a blackhole, and we know that travelling near the speed of light does odd things to our experience of time.
But beyond that, the universe is far weirder than our wildest tropes. There could be moons made of diamond, there could be planets with atmospheres so dense that if there was life inside them it would exist the same way that animals at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans do – via derivative energy sources rather than directly harvesting their local sun’s energy.
One of the big ideas I’ve been fascinated by for a long time now is the role of information in mathematics and, more generally, the universe itself. We tend to think of information as something we collate, gather and record. Except it’s entirely possible that information is the foundation stone of the entire edifice that is reality – that information is Real with a capital R. There’s an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics called Quantum Information Theory (QIT for short) whose entire thesis can be catchily summed up as the ‘Bit before It’.
What holds my ongoing fascination with QIT is how it suggests that every part of reality right down to the most fundamental components are, actually, bits of information. This might sound very esoteric (and, sure, it is) but some of the biggest problems in physics today focus on the nature of information and how that reflects reality.
When I say information I don’t mean how much my six pack of caffeine free Diet Coke costs nor even what the words caffeine free Diet Coke signify. If it’s not that then what do we mean when we talk about information?
When we talk about information in this cosmic context we talk about information as the thing which defines the very nature of reality. Consider a photon: the photon’s state (you could say the very nature of what it is) is encoded into its wavefunction. A wavefunction here is a mathematical expression for the very nature of the photon – describing among other things, its energy, position, chirality and entanglement. You add those things up and you get the photon. It’s not that information comes from describing the photon, it’s that information makes the photon. The information comes first and, according to this way of seeing the universe, is a real thing (it is THE real thing). Information is more real than the stuff you can touch because it’s the reason you can touch stuff in the first place.
This could feel very philosophical, too much woo-wah to be practical or interesting except to a small coterie of mathematicians, philosophers and physicists. Yet the answer to what information is informs a myriad of real world technologies such as how small we can make computer chips and how fast they can go. It informs subjects such as how birds navigate and how whales detect magnetic fields, and how information is transmitted via mechanisms such as DNA. After all, information is everywhere; information is everything.
If you put your head in the clouds you could see a world in which you could change the information that makes a photon and turn it into something else. Imagine a civilisation that could manipulate the information that builds reality the way you can edit a story on a word processor.
When I came to write my own space opera after years of not knowing the story I wanted to tell, I realised that a central thing I wanted to achieve was to bring space opera into the present by reflecting some of the most cutting-edge physics. You could say the big idea was to answer this question: what would Iain Banks’ Culture look like if it was founded on what we know now about the universe?
Which sounds fine, if overly ambitious, until you think about what that means. It means building civilisations that might categorise themselves not by their access to energy (the famous Khardashev scale) but by how easily they can manipulate information. After all, if you could take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and change the information that makes them hydrogen and reprogram the universe to have them as gold…then the amount of energy you have access to becomes pretty irrelevant (as does gold). Indeed you’d look at those who were stuck with mundane matter as technological primitives.
It’s what Star Trek’s replicators are based on – matter/energy transformation through manipulation of information – after all, you have to know what the information is that expresses hot dogs if you want to turn raw energy into the best hot dog in the galaxy.
If it’s a minor point in Star Trek, for me it’s a major one – what could threaten a civilisation that can turn your laser beams into cotton candy? What would be their struggle if they can access the very fundamental nature of the universe at will?
The thing is science doesn’t explain everything – and here I’m quoting the most brilliant physicist I ever met, Prof Tom McLeish – it’s the art of being wrong constructively. There’s always more to know and, potentially, always someone else who knows it. I settled here – if human brains are limited in how we encounter the universe and hence how we manage to imagine it, all other types of being will also have this category of limitation – be they AI, life evolved from bacteria or giant sentient stars – our shapes will define our experience of the world.
Hence, even if the universe really is information as stuff, we are, all of us, made of that stuff. If we could tweak the world by editing the page we’d still be limited in our ambitions, our scope, by the fact we are beings living inside the system.
“Bit before It” might change the very way we build our society, but I’ve become convinced that the ‘It’, the people processing that information, remain at the heart of the story. And that’s the big idea.
The 1997 Second Edition of Over the Edge, the acclaimed Atlas Games tabletop roleplaying game of surreal danger on the conspiracy-ridden, reality-bending Mediterranean island of Al Amarja, and more.
1) My nephew (who is currently thinking thoughts about either being transgender or non-binary) is now 7. Time flies. We had a brief family party today before the incursion of 20 1st and 2nd graders, which I bailed from to go back to work.
My niece, who is 4 3/4, is reading to the extent that she has conversations with my brother about a pluralization on her cereal box without having talked to him/been read to from it before, so that's ... impressive.
2) We have a very nice washing machine (LG, but not "smart") which started throwing errors at us today, and which we then fixed. This involved a minor flood because I didn't put one of the three different filters back the right way, but we set up a fan and a bunch of towels and *that's* fine. So: hey, we fixed a thing! On our own!
3) Apparently people in Somerville are seeing the aurora without artificial enhancements; what we got up here was, basically, a faintly green sky, but it was measurably different and pretty cool.
This is currently erroring at me, but will presumably get better soon: NOAA Aurora predictor.
So I'm back on my HGTV bullshit again, and I just watched an episode where Egypt and Mike designed "the ultimate bachelor pad" for a dude who plans to entertain his friends and family for cards and football games, and who has two enormous dogs, and they put a WHITE COUCH in his living room. Who DOES that?
Otherwise, it was a nice reno - the three-seasons deck especially. But a white couch just seems like a terrible idea for 99% of people, let alone a guy with 2 huge dogs.
It’s that time of year again where I always manage to get COVID. I have gotten COVID literally every single year since 2020, and pretty much exclusively around the holidays. I also happen to be flying to San Francisco this week and hanging out with a bunch of people while there, so I figured today was a good day to walk into my local Kroger and get a COVID shot.
Well, I ended up leaving without one, as I was told that unless I had a medical diagnosis or condition that required I get one per a doctor’s order, I couldn’t get one. I was baffled, since I could’ve sworn that for the past five years Kroger has been nonstop advertising walk-in vaccines, so I inquired further. I was told that it’s because of the new administration. Because why wouldn’t that be the reason?
Basically, she said that unless I had a “reason” to get the shot, my insurance wasn’t going to cover it. So I asked what if I just paid out of pocket, and she said it would be over two hundred dollars, and that I should try CVS or Walgreens to see if it was cheaper there.
I’m literally just, like, dumbfounded right now. I know that (thankfully) I can just pay out of pocket, or try a different place, or see if they’ll accept insurance or whatever, but what the fuck? Needing insurance to get a vaccine is bullshit. Needing a reason to get a vaccine is bullshit. I walked in to a clinic that advertised walk-in COVID shots, and left without one. That’s bullshit!
Anyway, I just wanted to come on here and vent, and see if anyone else has had a similar experience in the past few months? I want to get a flu shot, as well, and I’m hoping I don’t run into the same fucking issue.
We’ve come to that time of the year again, where folks begin to think about their holiday gift giving, and at least some of you think about books as the perfect gift. Well, they are! But would make them even more perfect is getting those books signed and personalized. Every year I join forces with Jay and Mary’s Book Center in Troy, Ohio, to sign and personalize books so that you’ll have them available to give to the people you love, including yourself.
From today (Nov. 11) through Friday, December 5, you can order books I have written from Jay and Mary’s and I will come in and sign them for you, and then the bookstore will ship them to you (US only). I strongly encourage you to get your orders in early, so there are no delays in shipping the books to you this holiday season.
Here’s how to do it!
1. Call Jay & Mary’s at their number (937 335 1167) and let them know that you’d like to order signed copies of my books. Please call rather than send e-mail; they find it easier to keep track of things that way.
2. Tell them which books you would like (For example, The Shattering Peace ), and what, if any, names you would like the book signed to. If there’s something specific you’d like written in the books let them know, but for their sake and mine, please keep it short. Also, if you’re ordering the book as a gift, make sure you’re clear about whose name the book is being signed to. If this is unclear, I will avoid using a specific name.
3. Order any other books you might think you’d like, written by other people, because hey, you’ve already called a bookstore for books, and helping local independent bookstores is a good thing. I won’t sign these, unless for some perverse reason you want me to, in which case, sure, why not.
4. Give them your mailing address and billing information, etc.
5. And that’s it! Shortly thereafter I will go to the store and sign your books for you.
Again, the deadline for signed/personalized books for 2025 is December 5. After December 5 all Scalzi stock will still be signed and available, but I will likely not be able to personalize.
Also, this is open to US addresses only. Sorry, rest of the world. It’s a cost of shipping thing.
What books are available?
CURRENT HARDCOVER: There are two current hardcovers: When the Moon Hits Your Eye and The Shattering Peace, both of which came out this year. In addition, there may be hardcovers available for Starter Villain, but ask first, as it’s primarily in trade paperback at this point. There is another hardcover out, Constituent Service, but it is a limited edition, and you would need to get it through the publisher, Subterranean Press.
CURRENT TRADE PAPERBACK: As of now, the first six books of the Old Man’s War series (Old Man’s War, The Ghost Bridages, The Last Colony, Zoe’s Tale, The Human Division, The End of All Things) are available in trade paperback with matching cover treatments, so if you wanted to give those six books as a gift, they are all now a matching set. Other books in trade paperback: Starter Villain, The Kaiju Preservation Society, The Android’s Dream, Agent to the Stars and Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (the 2013 Hugo Award winner), Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (which features a story of mine), Metatropolis (which I edited and contribute a novella to) are all also available in trade paperback format. Also available: Robots Vs. Fairies, the anthology that features the story of mine that was adapted for the “Three Robots” episode of the Netflix animated series Love, Death and Robots.
CURRENT MASS MARKET PAPERBACK: The entire Interdependency series (The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire and The Last Emperox) are available, both individually and as a boxed set. The fist six books of the Old Man’s War series (Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe’s Tale, The Human Division and The End of All Things) are available individually, and the first three of those books also come in their own boxed set (note, however, that the series is transitioning to trade paperback). Lock In, Head On and Unlocked: An Oral History of the Haden Syndrome (novella) are individually available as well. Fuzzy Nation, Agent to the Stars and The Android’s Dream have recently been moved into trade paperback, but mass market editions are probably still available if that’s your preference. Please note: If you order the boxed sets, if you want those signed you’ll have to agree to let me take the shrinkwrap off. In return I’ll sign each of the books in the box.
CURRENT NON-FICTION: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded (essay collection, Hugo winner), The Mallet of Loving Correction (also an essay collection, this will need to be special ordered as it is a signed limited), Virtue Signaling (a third essay collection, will also need special ordering) and Don’t Live For Your Obituary (a collection of essays about writing, will also need to be special ordered).
AUDIOBOOKS: The Kaiju Preservation Society, The Last Emperox, The Consuming Fire, The Collapsing Empire, The Dispatcher, The End of All Things, Lock In, Head On,The Human Division, Redshirts, Fuzzy Nation, The God Engines, Metatropolis and Agent to the Stars are all available on CD and/or MP3 CD, and Jay & Mary’s should be able to special order them for you. Check with them about other titles, which may or may not be currently available on CD.
Two things regarding audiobooks: First, if you want these, you should probably call to order these as soon as possible. Second, and this is important, because the audiobooks come shrinkwrapped, I will have to remove the shrinkwrap in order to sign the cover. You ordering a signed audiobook means you’re okay with me doing that and with Jay & Mary’s shipping it to you out of its shrinkwrap.
If you have any other questions, drop them in the comment thread and I’ll try to answer them!
I watched the documentary El sendero de la anaconda (The path of the anaconda, 2019) over the weekend, mere days before it's set to leave Netflix, mainly to feast my eyes on the sweet, sweet drone shots of the Colombian Amazon, not primarily down where I was, but up further north, where lie the absolutely stunning waterfalls of Jirijirimo and the massifs of Chribiquete. (The subtitles were not crooked; it's that I was taking snapshots of my computer and then I cropped the photos, etc. etc.)
The documentary went here and there, but one thing it touched on is rubber plantations, and in the story of these is the black swan event. The story goes like this:
In spite of torturing (completely literally) the local population to try to cultivate rubber commercially in the Amazon in the early years of the twentieth century, efforts were unsuccessful because of a pest of rubber trees endemic to the region. But the seeds were spirited out and taken to Southeast Asia, where successful plantations were established--and that's where all the world's commercial rubber came from.
Come World War II, Japan conquered the area and took control of the rubber plantations. Bad news for the Allies! They were desperate for any alternative source of rubber, so they sent an ethnobotanist down there--Richard Evans Schultes, in fact, the guy who's fictionalized in Embrace of the Serpent (review here). They wanted Schultes to locate a specimen of rubber tree that was (a) productive and (b) resistant to the pest. And he did find one!
Meanwhile, however, the Allies had developed synthetic rubber, and that was how they supplied themselves for the rest of the war. And then after the war ... "the clonal gardens that had preserved the germ plasm that had been collected at tremendous cost of blood and treasure were cut to the ground [on the orders of the US Department of State]. The files were seized and classified. Was it some kind of crazy conspiracy? No; it was just bureaucratic idiocy. That, plus faith in the future of synthetic rubber," says Wade Davis, the film's narrator, a writer, anthropologist, and student of Schultes.
Aye but there's the ... rub. Because along came radial tires--they need natural rubber. And then, even more important, along came airplanes that fly at 30+ thousand feet. "Only natural rubber has the qualities that allow it to go from the subzero temperatures of high altitude to the shock and impact of hitting the tarmac at 250 kilometers per hour within ten minutes. And because of that we use more natural rubber than ever before."
And it all comes from Southeast Asia, from trees that are all clones of the trees grown from the original smuggled-out seeds. "A single act of biological terrorism or the accidental introduction of the spore into Southeast Asia would completely disrupt the industry."
So that's fun!
The film leaves Netflix on November 14. It's a little bit unfocused, and even though it wants to uplift an indigenous worldview, it's VERY heavy on White Guy Talking, but it does have a few local voices. Still: it's very, very beautiful.
For anyone who's Dark Souls-curious and has a spare 30 mins, this is the best illustration I've seen of the process of figuring out a boss fight, and how you can go from dying in the first couple of seconds of a fight to methodical execution of it (and why it's so incredibly satisfying when you do):
For context, this is the Stray Demon, an optional side boss who's a very beefed-up version (now with added magic, as well as vastly increased damage and HP!) of the Asylum Demon from the tutorial.
I have a theory that the Asylum Demon is so pear-shaped partly in order to encourage the novice player to think of getting behind him and stabbing him in the arse, thus learning a key component of DS1 strategy (positioning yourself where it's hardest for them to hit you, which frequently means getting behind them or in their crotch).
I'm pretty stoked that I finished a series I started the same year I started it. Don't look at the fact it's only two books. It still counts, okay!? ( Read more... )
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It’s that time of year again where I always manage to get COVID. I have gotten COVID literally every single year since 2020, and pretty much exclusively around the holidays. I also happen to be flying to San Francisco this week and hanging out with a bunch of people while there, so I figured today was a good day to walk into my local Kroger and get a COVID shot.
