Attended the Writer’s Coffeehouse at Mysterious Galaxy yesterday. As always, I came away with lots of great advice :)

Many thanks to Jonathan Maberry for running these, and to Mysterious Galaxy for hosting!

My Notes from the Coffeehouse

Sometimes you have to pick one idea over another because it’ll be easier to sell

Negativity never helps. Da Vinci Code got slammed by so many people, and yet it was responsible for thrillers becoming the dominant genre on the bestseller lists (which they still are)

Lot of business discussions happen at comic-con, behind the scenes; he had meetings with agents, game devs, editors, etc.

If you have a published work in a genre, post on fb page and ask around about getting on a panel at one of these cons

Science people can be a big draw at these events

Got to get involved in these things, put yourself out there, to have these opportunities happen

Henry: started out with small cons, like ComicFest and ConDor, volunteered to put together panels, those smaller cons always need help, another author gave contact info for comiccon organizers, he did the same thing there, volunteered to put together panels, etc

One thing about moderating: try to come up with questions they haven’t had asked before, avoid the “where do you get your ideas?”, try to ask things that get into the personality of the panelists

Other writer noticed Henry asks questions that gets debate flowing among the panelists; respectful, but not all agreeing with each other

Henry: can write in a closet, but might not ever become popular, takes energy and work to get the connections and opportunities for a career in publishing

Suggestion: if you’re in a writing group, hold fake panels; have one person moderate, two or more be fake panelists, others watch and rotate; it’s great practice for later

Some writers will ask questions of the audience to get comfortable at signings

Handle interviews by focusing on what’s fun about it for you; the fun will show and the audience will love it

More practice: get group together, have one person go up and answer the same question over and over again in different ways

If you get on a panel, bring something to share out at the end

La jolla writer’s conference coming up Southern california writer’s conference coming up

Good advice: a pitch is telling someone how to sell your book

Maberry: writer’s conferences made him fall in live with writing again, would not be a fiction writer without them

Queries: never make absurd claims (this will be as big as harry potter!), or slam other books (this is so much better than harry potter!)

Don’t take pot shots at other books or series

Round the word count to the nearest 5,000. No need to give the exact word count

Most novels, they don’t want more than 100,000 words, because of the extra printing costs for a book of that size

Important to know the right length for your genre; epic fantasy tilts long (150K), westerns tilt short (65K)

DON’T QUERY UNTIL THE NOVEL IS COMPLETE AND POLISHED

Henry: timing of query and font doesn’t matter so much

Maberry: disagree; when you’re querying, getting this stuff right separates you out from amateurs

Maberry: prefers verbal queries; lots of writers' conferences, find which ones your target agents are going to

Don’t listen to the myth that agents who have sold X numbers of Y genre are no longer looking for more; it’s bunk; you want the agents that are known for selling your genre

Intern here from march fourth publishing house, she confirms everything (and suggests checking them out!)

Pitching in person: the agents there might not be right for you, but it’s good practice, hones your skills, and the agents that are there often come prepared with other agents they can recommend; if nothing else you can get feedback on the pitch

Keep in mind: the agents are just as nervous about this as you are

Jim Butcher: queried jennifer jackson and rejected by her, then met her at a conference, and she agreed to pick him up

Verbal pitches: don’t necessarily have to be pitching a finished book

#mswishlist twitter tag where editors and agents tweet about what they’re looking for

ALWAYS HAVE BUSINESS CARDS WITH YOU AND PUT YOUR FACE ON IT SO THEY CAN REMEMBER YOU

When doing verbal pitch, do not read your pitch, or stick to a script; pitch to the agent, change how you talk about it based on how they react to what you say

Elements of a good pitch: hook them, give them a sense of characters and the stakes, link it to other books and explain why people will want to read it (best to connect it to what you like as a reader, and show how other readers also like that thing)

Another good exercise: take a book you know, and pitch it to your writing group, see if you can get to the essential points

Don’t land too hard on the market piece, becomes too much of a sales pitch; connect it to readers who are real people, and yourself as a writer and someone you want them to want to work with for years

Pitch practice: genre, subgenre, demographic, main character’s name, and a crisis

Don’t think in terms of good or bad for your own writing. Think of “publishable” and “not yet publishable.” Take the latter parts and change what needs to be changed in order to make it publishable.

It’s done!

Finished the final editing pass for the last few chapters of my first novel early this week.

So now it’s time to build a list of agents to look at, and start querying.

I’ve been going to Publisher’s Marketplace every morning, researching another agent to add to the list. This weekend I’ll pick one, get my query letter in order for them, and send it off.

It’ll feel good to get the book out there. Even if every agent rejects it. True, the rejections will hurt…but there’s no way to get published without getting some.

And, now that the first book’s done, I can turn my attention to the second novel I wrote, and start putting together an editing plan for it. There’s also the short stories I wrote over the last month to edit (one may need a complete rewrite).

So much to do, and thank goodness!

Only four chapters left in the final editing pass for the novel.

Four chapters.

I’ll be done early next week. Thank the gods.

Then it’ll be time to gather a list of agents to send it out to, polish up my query letter, and start emailing the thing out.

It’s been…two years? almost three?…since I started work on it. And soon, very soon, I’ll finally have a finished version to send.

So, what have I learned? What lessons will I apply to the next book?

• Definitely break up your editing passes. Trying to fix every problem you see as you see it will only lead to a mess.
• Don't be afraid to edit the story. Your first take on the story -- not just the words, but what happens and why -- doesn't have to be the last one.
• You've got time to get it right. Take as many editing passes as you need. No one has to see it until it's ready.

Wife made it back from Arkansas on Tuesday (huzzah!), so my hermit-writing time is coming to a close.

Overall, I think having the weekly goals really helped me. While I didn’t hit them all (mumble mumble agent-search), I hit enough of them to build up a writing rhythm, and got a lot done.

All told, I’ve:

• written two new short stories, and have started a third
• circulated three previously-written stories
• completed final-pass editing of all but the last quarter of my first novel
• reviewed nine submissions by litreactor peeps

I like writing a new short story every week, but at some point I’m going to need to work on editing them all into shape, so I can submit them. So I’ll keep that one for perhaps the next week or two, then settle into editing what I’ve got.

Another classic that I just never got around to reading before.

And it’s deservedly a classic. Dickens absolutely skewers the ruling classes of three societies: his native England, pre-Revolutionary France, and the post-Revolutionary Terror. The snarky political commentary makes his dips into melodrama excusable.

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can write in the third-person POV without insight into any characters' thoughts or feelings at all, only their actions and words.
• Admitting that there is a narrator telling the story (while standing outside of it) gives you a chance to comment on the action, not just tell it.
• Even if readers can anticipate a turn in the story, if the characters don't know it's on its way, you can generate tension just in putting off the moment that that event happens.

Third and final week. How’d I do?

• Edit one chapter a day: Check. Whew.
• Write a new short story: Check! Last week's story is up on litreactor for feedback. Newest story will be going up as soon as I have the points.
• Critique two stories: Check and check.
• Find a new potential agent for querying: Dropped.
• Polish and submit a new story each month: Still on track. Got some good feedback on "Wednesday" from the fine folks at litreactor. I'll revise it this weekend, and should have it ready for submitting by the end of the month.

A nice, quick intro to the physical infrastructure of the internet. Doesn’t really go into how all those pieces work – there’s no discourse on the technology behind a router – but does build a mental image of the boxes, buildings, and people that keep the world connected.

Three things I learned:

• ARPAnet's first Internet Message Processing machine was installed at UCLA in 1969. The machines were manufactured on the East Coast, but only West Coast universities were open to the idea of the network at the time.
• In 1998, The Netherlands passed two laws to pave the way for fiber everywhere. One law required landowners to give up right of way for holes to be dug, second law required any company digging a hole to lay fiber to also let other companies lay their own cable in the same hole and share the costs. The one-two punch made it cheaper and easier to lay fiber, and also blocked anyone getting a monopoly.
• The busiest route in the world is between London and New York, with more internet traffic than any other line.

Two weeks in. Had a holiday in the middle of this one, so…how’d I do?

• Edit one chapter a day: Mostly check. 5 days out of 7 isn't too bad.
• Write a new short story each week: Done. First draft of "Wednesday" is complete and ready to submit to litreactor. Draft of second story is coming together.
• Critique two stories each week: Check. This has become the easiest one to do.
• Find a new agent to query each week: Nope again. I might need to drop this one, till the editing is done.
• Polish and submit a new story each month: On track. Hope to get feedback on "Wednesday" soon, and then will revise and start submitting. Also got a rejection back for one of the stories I'd submitted, so I need to send it out again this week.

I’m in love with Elm. No, really.

I don’t know if it’s just that I’ve been away from front-end development for a few years, but working in Elm has been a breath of fresh air.

When my boss offered to let us give Tech Talks on any subject at the last company meetup, I jumped at the chance to talk about Elm.

And, of course, if I was going to give a talk about Elm, I had to make my slides in Elm, didn’t I?

So I wrote elm-present.

It’s a (very) simple presentation app. Slides are json files that have a title, some text, a background image, and that’s it. Each slide points to the one before it, and the one after, for navigation.

elm-present handles reading in the files, parsing the json, and displaying everything (in the right order).

And the best part? You don’t need a server to run it. Just push everything up to Dropbox, open the present.html file in your browser, and voilà!

You can see the talk I gave the meetup here, as a demo.

Fantastically well-done. Weaves together magic, fairies, Great War trauma, romance, sisterly rivalry, and the treatment of special-needs children into one cracking good story.

So very happy to discover there are sequels.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Dribble out your backstory. At the start, offer just enough to explain the choices that brought the character to that point. Introduce the rest later, as needed for the story.
• You can get away with a romance between two characters that have little in common if you make their raw attraction clear and compelling.
• Sometimes the greatest climaxes (or turns in the story) happen when the protagonist realizes something about themselves that they didn't know before.

Last week I set some goals to keep me on track for a productive summer.

So, how am I doing?

• Edit one chapter a day: Check. I'm working through the novel backwards this time, to keep it fresh for my editing eyes.
• Write a new short story each week: Not complete, but new story (working title: Wednesday) is halfway done, and I'll wrap it up this weekend.
• Critique two stories each week: Check. By the time the new story's done, I should have enough points to post it to the litreactor workshop for feedback.
• Find a new agent to query each week: Nope. Need to set aside some time next week to do this.
• Polish and submit a new story each month: Check. I've currently got three short stories making the submission rounds, one of which I submitted for the first time this month.

Another strong portrayal of a villain from Grossman.

Avoids the trap of completely rehabilitating Nixon. He’s sympathetic without being likable, and interesting to follow without the reader always cheering them on.

Loses steam in the second half. There’s plot lines that go nowhere, scenes that could have been cut without changing anything, and the climax happens completely off-screen, with no buildup or release of tension.

Still, I learned a few things about writing:

• Delivering most of your plot via dialog -- so long as you're not data dumping -- can be a great way to keep the story moving.
• The best villains think they're the hero.
• Restricting your book to one POV can be too confining. Multiple POV can let you explore other aspects of your world, which you might need if your story takes place somewhere very different.

My wife’s in Arkansas for the next few weeks, visiting her mother for her annual pay-off-the-guilt-from-moving-to-California visit.

Normally, this is a time I tell myself I’m going to get a lot of writing done, hermit-in-the-woods style, but instead end up staring at the keyboard, trying to dig up inspiration.

So this time, I’m setting goals. Daily, weekly, and monthly goals:

• Final-pass edit one chapter in the first novel every day.
• Write a draft of a new short story every week.
• Critique two stories submitted to litreactor (the online writer's workshop) every week.
• Find a new agent to query every week.
• Polish and submit a new story to a new market every month.

I’m hoping the explicit, bite-sized goals will keep me focused. Who knows? They might become new habits.

A 1990s trenchcoats-and-mirrorshades action film published in the 21st century with 1950s gender roles. An odd, frustrating, throwback of a book.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Be careful when porting an old genre to a new skin. Bringing along the social mores along with the other elements will make your book feel dated from the start.
• Taking an otherwise-competent character and pushing them out of their element is a great way to both explore a new world and make it challenging for them.
• In sci-fi, it's not enough that the names of things -- computers, cars, etc -- change. Our relationship with them needs to change, too, or it's just window dressing.

Basically perfect. It’s low-key, character-driven sci-fi, stuffed with cool ideas and diverse cultures. Completely scratched my Firefly itch, in a good way :)

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Can think of chapters as episodes of a TV series, with cuts between multiple points of view, similar beats, and cliffhanger endings.
• Having the Shit Go Down at the end of the book rather than the beginning gives the reader time to know and care for the characters, making it more tense.
• You can get away with an infinite amount of info-dumping if it's a knowledgeable character explaining things to a clueless character.

At the Writer’s Coffeehouse this weekend, another writer asked what they should do when they have four novels, all finished, each in a different genre, that they want to pitch to agents. Should they target each book’s query to a different agent? Should they mention they have other novels when querying one of them?

The answer – which surprised me – was no to both.

Don’t mention the other novels when first querying. Save that for later, if they want to talk more.

And instead of sending out queries based on the book, pick the agents you’d like to represent you, and send them the book you think has the greatest commercial potential.

Agents will want to represent everything you have. But by querying with the book that will likely sell the best, it’ll be easier for them to imagine selling your book to a publisher, which will increase your chances of convincing them to represent you.

So now I’m confronted with the question: have I been editing the wrong book?

A frustrating question to have, when I’m only one editing pass away from being totally done. And I’ve already written the synopsis. And the query letter. And have agents picked out.

But maybe I’d be querying the wrong book? Of the three, I think my most recent one’s the strongest draft. The second one’s the best story, though, and my beta readers' favorite. The first one is, of course, the only one that’s actually done, in the sense of being a final draft.

So which one do I query with?

Disappointing.

Starts out well, action pumping and character backstories fleshed out just enough to make you care, but not enough to stop the flow of the story.

But the world around them never congeals for me, and the atmosphere of threat and double-cross the story needs can’t happen without it.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Switching perspective characters early on is a great opportunity to give more context to what's happening, since it's another angle on the world
• In a modern setting, you really can cut descriptions down to the bone, to put the focus on dialog and action
• Can do character backstory in a single chapter, covering years of someone's life, with breaks in-between

Fantastic. Absolutely nails the smugness and insincerity of the South, along with the surprise of finding help in unexpected places. Protagonist is a perfect mix of insecurity and snark.

Thank the gods it’s a series; can’t wait to read the next one.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Narrating a character's internal debate in long-form is fine, so long as it's in the right place: when the character is away from other people. Don't do it during dialog.
• You don't need dialect to write Southern characters. Getting their facial expressions and hypocrisy right is enough.
• Finding a real-life struggle that mirrors the fantasy one is a good way to ground it.

Exasperating. With the exception of The Faery Handbag, none of the supposed stories in this collection actually contain a story at all. Some of them contain multiple stories, nested and incomplete, but most are just character and setting with a complete lack of anything happening. Ever. For page after page.

Possibly the worst short story collection I’ve ever read.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Story is supreme. Choose your words well, but make telling a good story your first priority.
• Deliver on your promises to the reader. If you promise zombies, give them some damn zombies.
• If your story can be summed up in a single sentence, maybe it doesn't need to be an entire novel.

Novel edits are coming along faster than I thought. Might actually get them all done by the end of the month :)

It’s weird to see the novel being reshaped under my editing scalpel. I can feel the book getting better, little by little: its characters more consistent, the world more fully realized, the pacing tighter.

I’m remembering my plans for a follow-on book, and looking forward to writing it. Can editing a novel make you excited to write the sequel?

Masterful. Incredibly well-crafted series of nested narratives that simultaneously did a deep dive into Dracula lore and sucked me into a single family’s generations-long saga. Just…wow. So well done.

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can use flashbacks to cover over narrative time that would otherwise be boring, like train (or plane) travel
• To make an old myth feel fresh, look for the side that's not usually given a starring role (like the Turkish side of the Dracula legend), and explore it.
• Journals and letters are a great way to both nest stories, and keep each story personal, told by the person that lived it

It’s got an elderly kick-ass demon-assassin, zombies that can think, and a death goddess working at a small press. For that, I can forgive the continuity errors and the occasional odd plot point.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Watch out for the vague "some": "something made her", "something told her", "some sort of sense"...it gets overused too easily.
• Where you start your story affects how sympathetic your protagonist seems. Start it when they're under stress, and readers automatically feel for them. Start it with them relaxed but complaining about how rough they've got it, and readers might not be as charmed.
• Vivid, brief descriptions and snappy dialog can pull a reader through the roughest parts of your story.

“Gothic” in the overwrought, melodramatic sense.

There’s some fantastic ideas in here, but it was tough one for me to finish.

Three things I learned about writing:

• People falling love notice everything about their beloved. If writing from the POV of a character falling in love, their thoughts will dwell on even insignificant details about their beloved.
• Constant repetition of unexplained magical elements makes them annoying and boring. Conserve the magic, to make it interesting.
• Use a deep dive into a character's thoughts during conversation sparingly. Dialog should speed the story along, interrupting the flow with paragraphs of thought undercuts momentum and frustrates readers.

Managed to whittle the list of editing passes from twelve to twenty and now back to thirteen.

Which means I didn’t finish them by the end of March, like I wanted.

I did finish the biggest of the changes, though: giving each chapter to either the male or the female protagonist, swapping evenly between the two, and filling out her narrative arc so that her storyline has equal weight.

The changes I have left are much smaller: revising character appearances, adding touches to scene descriptions, and making sure everything is consistent.

Still, I’m setting weekly goals, aiming for three editing passes done each week. At that rate, I’ll be finished with the edits in early May :/

Much later than I’d like, but I tell myself that’s better than not doing them, or worse yet, continuing to tweak and edit for a year or more.

Julia feels…rough.

There are parts I absolutely love, like the strong typing, the baked-in matrix operations, and the support for multi-type dispatch.

Then there’s the pieces that seem incomplete. Like the documentation, which is very extensive, but proved useless when trying to find out the proper way to build dictionaries in the latest version. Or the package system, which will install things right into a running repl (cool!) but does it without getting your permission for all its dependencies (boo).

All in all, I’d like to build something more extensive in Julia. Preferably something ML-related, that I might normally build in Python.

Day One

• can install with brew
• book written for 0.3, newest version is 0.5
• has a repl built in :)
• typeof for types
• "" for strings, '' only for single-chars
• // when you want to divide and leave it divided (no float, keep the fraction)
• has symbols
• arrays are typed, but can contain more than one type (will switch from char to any, for example)
• commas are required for lists, arrays, etc (boo)
• tuples: fixed sized bags of values, typed according to what they hold
• arrays carry around their dimensionality (will be important for matrix-type ops later on)
• has dictionaries as well
• hmm: typeof({:foo => 5}) -> vector syntax is discontinued
• Dicts have to be explicitly built now: Dict(:foo => 5) is the equivalent
• XOR operator with $
• bits to see the binary of a value
• can assign to multiple variables at once with commas (like python)
• trying to access an undefined key in a dict throws an error
• in can check membership of arrays or iterators, but not dictionaries
• but: can check for key and value in dict using in + pair of key, value: in(:a => 1, explicit)
• book's syntax of using tuple for the search is incorrect
• julia docs are really...not helpful :/
• book's syntax for set construction is also wrong
• nothing in the online docs to correct it
• (of course, nothing in the online docs to correct my Dict construction syntax, either)
• can construct Set with: Set([1, 2, 3])
• arrays are typed (Any for multiple types)
• array indexes start at 1, not 0 (!) [follows math here]
• array slices include the ending index
• can mutate index by assigning to existing index, but assigning to non-existing index doesn't append to the array, throws error
• array notation is row, column
• * will do matrix multiplication (means # of rows of first has to match # of columns of second)
• regular element-wise multiplication needs .*
• need a transpose? just add '
• very much like linear algebra; baked-in
• dictionaries are typed, will throw error if you try to add key/value to them that doesn't match the types it was created with
• BUT: can merge a dict with a dict with different types, creates a new dict with Any to hold the differing types (keys or values)

Day Two

• if..elseif...end
• if check has to be a boolean; won't coerce strings, non-boolean values to booleans (nice)
• reference vars inside of strings with $ prefix: println("$a")
• has user-defined types
• can add type constraints to user-defined type fields
• automatically gets constructor fn with the same name as the type and arguments, one per field
• subtype only one level
• abstract types are just ways to group other types
• no more super(), use supertype() -> suggested by compiler error message, which is nice
• functions return value of last expression
• ... to get a collection of args
• +(1, 2) -> yields 3, operators can be used as prefix functions
• ... will expand collection into arguments for a function
• will dispatch function calls based on the types of all the arguments
• type on pg 208: int() doesn't exist, it's Int()
• WARNING: Base.ASCIIString is deprecated, use String instead.
• no need to extend protocols or objects, classes, etc to add new functions for dispatching on core types: can just define the new functions, wherever you like, julia will dispatch appropriately
• avoids problem with clojure defmulti's, where you have to bring in the parent lib all the time
• julia has erlang-like processes and message-passing to handle concurrency
• WARNING: remotecall(id::Integer,f::Function,args...) is deprecated, use remotecall(f,id::Integer,args...) instead.
• (remotecall arg order has changed)
• randbool -> NOPE, try rand(Bool)
• looks like there's some overhead in using processes for the first time; pflip_coins times are double the non-parallel version at first, then are reliably twice as fast
• julia founders answered the interview questions as one voice, with no distinction between them
• whole section in the julia manual for parallel computing

Day Three

• macros are based off of lisp's (!)
• quote with :
• names fn no longer exists (for the Expr type, just fine for the Module type)
• use fieldnames instead
• unquote -> $
• invoke macro with @ followed by the args
• Pkg.add() will fetch directly into a running repl
• hmm...installs homebrew without checking if it's on your system already, or if you have it somewhere else
• also doesn't *ask* if it's ok to install homebrew
• not cool, julia, not cool
• even then, not all dependencies installed at the time...still needed QuartzIO to display an image
• view not defined
• ImageView.view -> deprecated
• imgshow does nothing
• docs don't help
• hmm...restarting repl seems to have fixed it...window is hidden behind others
• img no longer has data attribute, is just the pixels now
• rounding errors means pixels != pixels2
• ifloor -> floor(Int64, val) now
• works!