Tim Cooper's The Reader: War For The Oaks

It’s March, and you can now get IF THIS GOES ON, the anthology of near future political science fiction that I edited. There are some amazing stories in it, and I’m so proud of how the book turned out. Please check it out, and if you enjoy it, spread the word with a review or mention!

The project was initially the idea of publisher Colin Coyle; it was a pleasure working with him along with an awesome team of slush readers. The book was a mix of solicited stories along with ones that came in through the slush pile, so there’s a nice mix of more established and newer voices.

Some of the authors are friends as well, including E. Lily Yu, who I first met working with Fantasy Magazine and whose lovely “Green Glass: A Love Story” leads off the collection in a way that is beautiful and disturbing. The stories are sad and funny, often biting. Sometimes the worlds they project are just a heartbeat away; other times they are surreal glimmers that show us the distortions in our own existence and interactions with the world.

All of them are political — some more subtle than others, certainly — but this project declares itself from page one to be about politics in this country and the world at large.

In related news, I’ve also curated another Storybundle for Women’s History month, the second Feminist Futures one. You can find it here: I’m very happy with this, which ended up being nicely diverse, plus let me put forth K.C. Ball’s collection, SNAPSHOTS FROM A BLACK HOLE AND OTHER STORIES. K.C. was a friend and I edited the collection. She also edited the flash magazine TEN FLASH, which published my flash piece, “Lost in Drowsy Dreams.”

Grab the bundle now – it’s only good for a few weeks, and it has some really terrific reads in it!

Several new classes have been added to the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers schedule, including this weekend’s live online class Mapping the Labyrinth: Plotting Your Novel So Things Happen. I’ve co-taught with Kay several times, and she is a savvy and elegant woman. I’m anticipating learning things from the class myself.

Other upcoming classes being taught for the first time are The Fashion of Worldbuilding: Clothes, Technology, and Taboos with Mary Robinette Kowal and Catherine Lundoff’s In Flagrante Delicto: Writing Effective Sex Scenes and So You Want to Put Together An Anthology?. You can find the full list of live online writing classes here; look for several more getting added this month.

In 2020, Meerkat Press launches Meerkat Shorts, a novelette and novella line, and my “Carpe Glitter” will be part of the initial line-up, along with “Into Bones Like Oil” by Kaaron Warren and “Wild Horse” by Kyle Richardson. “Carpe Glitter” is the story of a woman sorting through the masses of stuff accumulated by her grandmother, a retired stage magician, who runs across something very strange indeed.

Chez Rambo has moved! And one feature of the new place is a much quieter space for podcasting, where there’s not a fire engine whirling by or a recycling truck picking up an apartment building’s worth of trash or similar Very Noisy Events happening every half hour. Here’s two recent additions to the Youtube channel: How to Send Out Stories and How to Evaluate Markets. Got something you want explored in a future video? Drop me a line in the comments here.

I’ve confirmed I’ll be at the Bard’s Tower at Emerald City Comic Con this month. I’ll post a schedule of when I’ll be at the booth, but my plan is to spend most of my time there, since it’s so much fun hanging out with those awesome folks. If you’re going to be there, please stop by and say hi!

On March 14, I’m part of the People Eat and Give fundraising event for the excellent nonprofit the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a nonprofit writing and communications program that provides after school tutoring, workshops, and other efforts to “prepare young people, ages 6 to 18, for a successful future by developing strong writing skills, championing diverse communication styles, and motivating young people to share their stories.” I’m part of the skit the kids have written and are putting on; we’ve got our first rehearsal this weekend!

There’s an event for Unfettered III: Tales by Masters of Fantasy, which has my story, “Merchants Have Maxims,” in it on Tuesday, March 19, at 7 PM. I’ll be there signing along with several of the other authors as well as its editor Shawn Speakman.

Yesterday I got very little writing done, and instead worked on plotting. Ugh. I’ve reached that stage of the manuscript where I feel like I’m herding cats, and it seemed like time to make things make more sense.

Major Ingredients for Plotting

In starting, I had the following:

• a strong idea of each major character’s story arc
• the first book, which has some chronological overlap with volume 2
• a lot of scenes in various stages — some complete, some partial, some only notes, all contained in Scrivener
• a somewhat ragged and incomplete synopsis

And some things that made the process of plotting more complicated:

• Complication #1 to plotting: multiple POVs, including some episodes that overlap in time. Arranging these is much harder than you would think.
• Complication #2 to plotting: a couple of readers complained that the 1st book started slow. I wanted this one to grab and go.
• Complication #3 to plotting: a feeling that the POVs must be balanced to some extent.

Figuring Out the Overall Structure: the Sketchbook Method
So I printed out the synopsis and got out my big sketchpad. I wrote the three chronological points that were most important from the first book on the page, roughly where I thought they’d fall in the book: one at the very beginning, one about a quarter way through, and one about half the way through.

At first I divided the page into three sections for three acts, but by the time I was done, there were five sections total. I think of them as “acts” in that I want them to begin at an interesting point, have the right mix of scenes from the different POVs, and finish in a way that feels like a mini-ending, a chance to think about what’s gone before and to prepare for what’s coming up.

As you can see, that first page eventually ended up looking like a bit of a mess (and right now the image keeps showing up sideways, for some inexplicable reason that I cannot figure out at the moment), but it let me figure out where some things had to happen and realize that I had to nail down where a particular character from the first book is at all times.

I started working with colored pencils in order to track the different main characters, but that fell away as I began arranging what I already had. But it’s handy to be able to see the story from a high altitude, the 10,000 foot view, so to speak, particularly in terms of making the story make sense. Because while the writer can — and probably should deviate from a straightforward chronology for anything but the least complicated of stories — every time they do it, they place a demand on the reader to jump the hurdle and bounce along into the next scene with them.

As far as what’s been written, I have it in Scrivener, that most indispensable of tools. My process lately has been to work on individual scenes in nothing at all like chronological order, but more in the order of ones that really will be fun to write first (this approach has the drawback of inevitably arriving at a final sludge of scenes you didn’t want to write, but you will find at that point that at least half of them are actually not necessary.) So I began splitting up the pieces that were actually multiple scenes crammed in one document because they’d all been part of the same writing sprint, and numbering each one.

Breaking Things Down: Individual Acts

Taking my big sheet, I created a new one for each of the first four sections, and with each, tried to figure out the structure as far as the alternating voices went. I realized that what I had were two main points of view (Adelina and Sebastiano) and then a third one consisting of a brother and a sister (Eloquence and Obedience).

As I went through the manuscript, I began to sort the scenes into order, creating folders for the different POVs. While the scenes may not happen in the exact order they do in the folder, this gets me started putting scenes that will be close together into a single chunk.

Here are the individual act pages. As you can see, they’re messy and inexact, but they’re helping me sort out what goes where in a way that will then let me compile what I have into a document and start looking for the major holes, since filling them in is the next step.

Once I have those holes filled in, I’ll begin wrestling each chunk into a smooth form, and imposing a story arc of one kind or another on it.

Someone asked how I use Tarot cards in plotting. I use them as a way to figure out the major points and considerations for a scene or a chunk, by doing a simple Celtic Cross reading for the main character in that scene. If you’re not familiar with Tarot cards and that configuration for reading them, here’s better information on the spread, and I’ll blog sometime in the next couple days with a sample reading for a scene (but right now I should put in some actual ficiton wordcount).

Some SFWA and Class-related Stuff
In SFWA news, Todd Vandemark has put up the 1st of the videos he filmed at this year’s Nebulas, Steven Gould and I talking about joining SFWA. There will be new content on the channel released on a regular basis throughout the coming year, and I’m pleased to see that idea finally taking solid form.

Maggie Hogarth is onboard as the new Vice President and already hard at work. Look for some cool stuff coming up over the new year. 🙂

Finally, I’ve been doing some teaching from retreat and finding out that the wireless works fine. The Writing Your Way Into Your Novel class was terrific and gave me lots of ideas. This Saturday the 6 week Writing F&SF Stories starts. I’ve still got slots in that (as well as most of the other classes) and would be willing to talk about sliding scale or barter if you’re interested. If you’re interested, check out the list of classes here.