Hugh Perkins

Just wrote a short story about a schizophrenic computer, in a single session.  It’s just slightly more than 2000 words, which is about the optimum length for crits on Critters.

The plot is mzb-compliant.

There are lots of obvious flaws in the story, but I’m fairly happy about it.

Going to show it to my girlfriend, who tends to give reliable feedback that seems to correspond to how others see my stories, then probably will make it available here.

Edit: decided just to submit it and see how it fairs. Have to start submitting sometime…

Just finished writing a new story. I’ve tried to follow mzb’s guide to how to write an interesting commercial story.

It’s about a guy with no legs and arms who lives on the street. How can he find love?

I’ll put it out once I’ve got my gf to read through it. She’s pretty good at knowing how well a story works.

One big advantage about mzb’s model that I’ve noticed as I write this post is: it’s really easy to write an interesting trailer for the story, without giving anything away.

After the qualified success of “The Freezer” on Critters, I was looking forward to seeing what happened to “Obsolescence”.

It’s bombing. No-one has reviewed it yet, not even one, and it’s been up nearly a whole day.

Grrr….

Some things work well, some things work less well..

Would be nice to get at least one review to find out why it’s bombing quite so much.

Ratatouille is very funny, and a good example of a plot that conforms to mzb’s requirements.

The protagonist is a rat who enjoys cooking. He spends lots of time practicing, trying not to be noticed by his father, who doesn’t approve. He spends time in the kitchen of a nearby house, experimenting with the ingredients, until one day the house owner sees him, and he is forced to flee.

The plot is about the rat’s quest to become a famous cook, not that that is what he is looking for: he just wants to cook, using the finest ingredients, making the finest foods, for other people to enjoy.

We don’t see him learning to cook, but we do see his passion for it. At the start, he risks death by grilling a mushroom on a roof during a lightning storm. When they are struck by lightning, his first thoughts are how delicious the lightning-struck mushroom is, rather than worrying about his safety.

He is adopted by a weak chef in the kitchens of a famous restaurant in Paris. The success of this chef under the rat’s guidance lead to conflict between the pair, and jealousy from the head chef.

Eventually, all is resolved, and the rat lives his dream life, as the chef he had always wanted to be.

Ratatouille is very funny, and one can watch it happily several times.

Encouraged by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s essay which made it sound pretty easy to make modest amounts of money by writing short stories, I emailed a guy from Critters who has published about 30 short stories, asking to what extent it is possible to make a living from writing.

His answer:

Making a living from short stories: impossible.

Making a living from novels: nearly impossible.  Most published novelists have a day job, and are writing novels on the side.

Which is confusing given mzb’s optimistic outlook on this.

What I think, how I reconcile these two points of view, is that mzb massively underestimates the difficulty involved in writing, because she had been writing for so long, and had forgotten quite how much stuff she’d learned over the years.

It’s a little like when I tried to convert my gf into a programmer.  I thought it would be sufficient for her to read a book for a month or two, and then become a programmer, become rich, travel the world.  But no: I’d forgotten how many things I had learned, and forgotten I’d even learned.  For example: what’s a “file”?  Sounds obvious to any techie person, but quite hard to communicate the concept to someone who’s barely used computers before.

Four years later, my gf is somewhat close to getting a job as a developer, but hasn’t got one yet.  Four years.  Compared to my initial estimate of one to two months

So, I feel that mzb was doing the same thing in her essays: forgetting quite how much she has learned over the years, and quite how brilliant she was at writing.

On another tack, it does seem that it is possible to make some money from writing short stories, but basically, if one is really good, it’s possible to earn a little less than I was earning before by writing scripts in SecondLife, by playing a computer game, which I thought at the time was a fairly eccentric and precarious way of making money.

Whilst I was reading through the crits for the last week’s manuscripts, came across a couple of interesting links in a review by Ian Creasey:

• “Ten of the top speculative fiction magazine editors talk about what they do and how they do it”
• “What Is A Short Story?” by author Marion Zimmer Bradley

The first piece looks like a good list of potential magazines to try to sell stories to.

The second piece describes convincingly some points to bear in mind to make a story highly sellable:

“A LIKABLE CHARACTER overcomes ALMOST INSUPERABLE ODDS and BY HIS OR HER OWN EFFORTS achieves a WORTHWHILE GOAL.”

I spent today reading other people’s crits of the manuscripts that I wrote crits for on critters.org a couple of weeks ago.

Many of the crits for any single manuscript are fairly homogeneous, and in addition, many of them basically said similar things to what I said and thought for that manuscript.

So, it’s a fair surmise that if I was a reader reading my own works, but without having first written them, that I would write similar things to those that were written in the crits sent to me for my own work.

And therefore it probably makes quite considerable sense for me to pay them careful attention.  That’s a blow, because some of the things were things I was hoping to write off as just some guy’s warped view on my work

In addition, whilst the reviews for one specific manuscript are quite homogeneous, the reviews from any specific critter across different manuscripts are quite different.

So that enhances the logic that means that I really should pay attention to the reviews of my work.

Lastly, I was excusing the lack of people saying how great my work was as simply being that critters tend not to say positive things in their reviews, but in fact there are works out there that receive plenty of positive reviews, so my excuse to myself is not very solid

I re-read some of the reviews of the Freezer in the light of these somewhat disturbing conclusions, and paid much closer attention to the points that were made.

Received a bunch of crits on Critters.org for The Freezer.

It’s a fairly harsh experience.  It’s hard to convince oneself that it’s normal to have people bash one’s story quite so much, especially the story one feels came out the best!

A few people really laid into my story.  Some even suggested a complete re-write with a complete new storyline!

Certain reviewers were more to the point.

Lots of people felt the amount of swearing was excessive.

Apparently my usage of “girlfriend” as a synonym for “wife” is a little out-there.

A couple of people felt it could be useful to have a little more narrative, and a little less dialogue.

Generally, the feeling seemed to be that the protagonist was not sympathetic enough, entered into mortal combat a little too readily with his doppelganger.

Overall however, there are 20 manuscripts to choose from, and most people only choose one of these 20 to crit, so the fact that so many people chose this story as the target for their critting is a fairly good sign.  I can’t say I got massively more crits than average, perhaps I did in fact get the median number of crits, but I didn’t get zero, or very few, which I had been a little concerned about initially.