In Sputnik’s Orbit

Brad Torgersen recently posted his opinions about the Hugo nominating and balloting process in what is fast becoming a tradition as sensible and esteemed as the minority response to the President’s State of the Union address. Sad Puppies III, it seems, will either destroy science fiction or tear down the pyres of injustice upon which it’s already smoldering.

Or not.

Brad is my friend. He’s a more-than-fine writer, a kind and decent man, and a thoughtful commentator on all things writerly, whether you agree with him about them or not. But while I’ve not made an exhaustive survey of the “Sad Puppies” blogs by Brad and Larry Correia and others over the last two years, what I have read rather reminds me of the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer says, “They STOLE my idea!” to which Jerry replies, “Which idea was that? To spend $10 million you don’t have or renovate a building you don’t own?”

The fact of the matter is, the Hugo is set up to meet the needs of the World Science Fiction Society, and key among these is to promote attendance at its conventions and their maintenance as the preeminent of their kind. It’s their party, and they make the rules. Which is not to say Brad and Larry and the other can’t have their opinions, or state them loudly, or go start (and fund) their own shindig.

I hope the result is a reward for literary quality and skill, but both are subject to complex tastes and trends, the waxing and waning of which are fundamental to healthy society. I’m not going to pander to whatever I think is this year’s anointed minority or theme, but neither am I going to shy away from writing stories that question the firmament at both ends of the political spectrum. That’s what spec fic is for, to disturb perspectives, not enshrine them.

In the meantime, I can’t worry about politics. Having won the Writers of the Future contest last year, I’m far too busy working on my own projects to worry about what WSFS is doing right or wrong. For the record, though, my stories, “Rainbows for Other Days” and “Callista’s Delight” are both eligible for Hugo and Campbell Award nomination this year—just sayin’. I’m not going to hold my breath, and Im not going to stay up late nights wondering whether the system is stacked against me. I’m just going to keep writing, and improving, and trying to connect with my audience, and I think that’s what we all better do.

David Gerrold wrote The Trouble With Tribbles, and has been writing ever since. He’s a curmugeon. And he’ss been around. Here is his list of “Essential Science Fiction/Fantasy Books from the Golden Age”. That is all

• Starship Troopers, Heinlein (runner-up, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Heinlein) Why? Because it was the beginning of a whole subgenre, military SF.
• The Left Hand of Darkness, LeGuin (runner up: Venus Plus X, Sturgeon ) Examining the nature of gender.
• Dune, Herbert (runner up: Game of Thrones, Martin) Epic political adventure.
• Ringworld, Niven (runner up: Rendezvous With Rama, Clarke) The large big thing….
• The Stars My Destination, Bester (runner up: Nova, Delaney or Slan, Van Vogt) Space opera.
• The Dying Earth/Eyes of the Overworld, Vance (runner up: The City And The Stars, Clarke) Far future adventure.
• The Fountains of Paradise, Clarke (runner up: The Web Between The Worlds, Sheffield) Orbital space elevator
• Stand On Zanzibar, Brunner (runner up: The Sheep Look Up, Brunner) Sprawling, multi-character epic portrayal of a future world.
• Snowcrash, Stephenson (runner up: Shockwave Rider, Brunner) Where cyberpunk began.
• Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Heinlein (runner up: Citizen of the Galaxy, Heinlein) Classic young adult adventures.

For quite some time, I resisted Scrivner. Not so much resisted, really, as ignored, as it didn’t appear to actually exist in my universe of Linux and cheap hardware and mostly free, open source software. Besides, I’ve become adept at getting LibreOffice to do everything I really need a word processor to do, or so I thought.

I was wrong.
A recent question by a friend led me to do a little research, and I soon found that there has been a free Linux beta for Scrivner for some time. In spite of its beta status and a number of old complaints in the support forum, I decided to check it out. And holy crap! This is the word processor I would have written had I wanted to spend my nights writing code like in olden days instead of chasing literary rainbows.

Since I started writing Citadel Rules, I’ve been struggling to adapt my natural pantsing creative style to the more structured approach that years of software development experience tells me is critical to producing quality at a productive pace. I’ve bought notecards and dry-erase and and half dozen books on structure and screenplay writing. All have merits, but none gave me what I really, intuitively want, a literary take on good, old fashioned “stepwise refinement”.

Stepwise refinement is a concept from computer science in which a program is first written as essentially a mostly-English outline, and then its steps are each refined into more detailed steps, and so on and so on until the steps match the level of implementation detail of the system on which it will be executed. Similarly, I want to be able to start with a generic outline of the structure I’m going for, then progressively write down into each act, chapter, or scene.

Scrivner is perfect for this. It lets you subdivide a section at any time, and sections can be named, moved, demoted or promoted within the manuscript, or stuck down in a research folder for later reference. Better yet, Scriver lets you view your work in an outline that displays word count totals for every folder and subfolder, to help with pacing and chapter size and other length concerns that worry us writers.

And it doesn’t matter how convoluted the outline becomes, because Scrivner embraces another principle from computer science, the separation of content from presentation. Once your work is finished, Scrivner will “compile” it into any of dozens of formats, from standard manuscript format in rtf format, to any of a number of ebook formats for final consumption. Scriver even offers customizable wizards to let you, for example, convert all italics to underscore when producing a manuscript, but not an ebook.

Microsoft Word and Libre/OpenOffice have outline views, and the latter has support for breaking a large document up into component sections under a master file, but neither is really of much help in drafting out a novel, because it takes too much effort to move pieces around, and to switch back and forth between the outline and the text. Scrivner addresses this to, by providing each section with a synopsis and other metadata.

Scrivner will have it’s problems. For a start, it does not yet support all the export formats in the Linux beta, but it’s a giant step in the right direction, and it runs just fine on my little Linux-converted Chromebook.

How about you? Have you ever found the perfect tool to do what you love? Share it in a comment below.

So I’ve been playing around on Amazon’s “WriteOn” this week (thanks Andrea!) and here’s my first blush opinion: It has the same feel as software projects I’ve worked on in which graphic artists are put in charge of design. Graphic artists are great. I know some graphic artists who are wonderful, sweet people, and they make things shiny and beautiful. But that’s not what software is about, it’s about getting work done, and confusing “functional” for “pretty” is a costly, usually fatal design mistake.

WriteOn is an online critique site, but it doesn’t call itself a critique site. It calls itself a “story lab,” which is not what you call yourself if you are trying to serve people who know what things are called in this business–which is clue #1 that something isn’t quite tuned correctly in the old whatthehellometer. The site itself is pretty, and pretty odd. The main menu looks like a storefront, with lots of “covers” which I initially confused for Amazon advertising, but no, these are (randomly selected?) story posts presented as if they were published works. This is clue #2 than something wicked might this way may just be a coming.

A critique site is where WRITERS go to get and give feedback on WRITING and the business of WRITING. Writers work in standard manuscript format–occasionally with some accommodation to online presentation. IF a work makes it to publication, IF the author is self-publishing, he or she MIGHT become involved in cover design. But at this stage, presentation is (or should be) far from a writer’s mind. Which is clue #3, and a very big clue indeed, that you got trouble, my friend, trouble I say, right here in River City.

WriteOn offers a simple little wizard that allows–nay, REQUIRES–you to create “covers” for your uploaded works. The uploaded works, themselves, are presented in a virtual reader designed to look something like a printed book or e-reader. Why? There are only two possible reasons. Either the creators of WriteOn don’t know that real writers deal in raw words and mostly find all this presentation stuff a distraction and waste of critically valuable time, or they are trying to feed the publication fantasies of the unwashed masses.

If the former is the case, it’s a bit annoying. Since these covers exist, making them attractive becomes a critical, time-consuming, unproductive step in attracting critiques. That’s annoying, but critiques are so valuable, we’ll go along with it if the feedback is worth it. But if the later is true, then that’s unlikely.

We’ll see. WriteOn may turn out to be the greatest thing since sliced Linotype, or it may be a fool’s errand. Time will tell. In the meantime, here is my first cover: