Introducing Re:Fiction

There are tons of great writing resources out there, but that's not to say that there isn't the need for more, especially when they're bringing something fresh to the table.  For that reason amongst others, I've grown rather fond of new website Re:Fiction.  In essence, the bulk of what they have to offer is fairly standard - a bunch of articles on the craft of writing - but the presentation and ethos behind them is refreshing.  Pieces are exactly the write length, well-suited to browsing without being too light and trivial, and everything is easy on the eyes.  Founder Tal Valente makes the point in her bio that her twin passions for writing and computing fit well together, and I've always found this to be the case myself.  Partly because I'm obsessed with using spreadsheets for absolutely everything, I admit, but mostly because there's a lot to be said for getting the technical business right in this day and age.  Re:Fiction has the feel of a site put together by people who know their way around this stuff, and that automatically puts it head and shoulders above a lot of similar resources I've come across.

It's also worth mentioning that they actually have some good writers providing their content - my friend Andy Knighton amongst them, who always talks lucidly and well upon the subject of writing.  There's also a nice subdivision going on, with the meat and potatoes actual-writing stuff set aside from the thorny topic of inspiration and all of that extraneous nonsense we tend to file under "lifestyle" and inevitably ends up eating ninety percent of your time.

The main reason I'm pointing you towards Re:Fiction, however, is something I haven't seen elsewhere and that's, frankly, pretty awesome: they're offering a free critique service on short fiction, provided by experienced editors.  Theoretically there are some restrictions in place, but with the site still being fairly new, your chances of getting accepted appear to be high: certainly they were good enough to take a look at one of my stories, even after I admitted that I write for a living.  And the feedback I got was pretty solid, certainly as good as I've had from a few professional editors in my time.  More to the point, getting any kind of quality feedback on your work is profoundly difficult: friends are rarely harsh enough, other writers you don't know well are prone to competitiveness, and everyone everywhere is short of time to spare.

On those grounds - and as a small thank you for the free help they gave me! - I'm glad to recommend Re:Fiction.  If you're just starting out and need some pro tips, or if you're an established writer in need of an outside perspective, or if you're either and just want some good quality feedback on your work, then they're well looking up.

Writing Ramble: In Defense of Second Drafts

Recently my friend Andy Knighton wrote an excellent blog post titled Surviving the Second Draft, which did exactly what it said on the tin, offering some sensible tips on how to struggle through that fearsome first redraft.

I say, "fearsome first redraft" - but second drafts are my absolutely favourite part of the writing process.  I commented to that effect on Andy's post, smugly pointing out that "you take something that’s kind of a mess and make it into something really good, what’s not to like?" and Andy made the sensible point that not everyone likes to admit they messed up the first time, never mind having to think about setting right what once went wrong.

This is very true.  And if I think back, I know full well that there was a time when I felt the same.  First drafts were sacred brain-goop, the raw outpourings of an unfettered subconscious.  Second drafts were weird and icky, a process of picking over something best left unpicked.  And third drafts were - well, why would you have a third draft, when you'd nailed it the first time, then made yourself miserable trying to find faults in something that was just fine to begin with?  As much as I might not want to relive such early writing traumas, I understand.

Still.  The fact remains that I was wrong.  Seconds drafts are awesome.

I guess that when you're starting out, the first draft has to be fun, otherwise there'd never be any end product.  And second drafts are the natural antithesis of that; they're about conceding your mistakes, which is not generally considered an enjoyable act.  Still.  If you're relatively new to writing then I promise you, second drafts are where it's at.  And not only is that the case but it's a good thing.

Why?  Partly because it takes away some of that awful, mind-crushing fear that first putting finger to keyboard - and then doing the same again and again and again until you actually have something resembling a story - involves.  Embracing second drafts is to admit that your first drafts aren't perfect, and never could have been, were never meant to be.  It's to accept your own fleshy weakness, your flimsy-brainedness, and to comprehend that human beings create processes for a reason.  The reason  second drafts exist is because you will never, ever get everything right the first time.  Maybe you'll make a million typos.  Maybe you'll settle for third person when your protagonist needed to be telling their story themselves.  Maybe you'll fling about adverbs with wild abandon and forget that speech tags are a thing.  Or perhaps it will be a combination of all those failings and more.

But it's okay.  The second draft is your safety net.

Here's the thing: second drafts are the point where you get to get things right.  Inevitably my first drafts disappoint and unsettle me.  There are nuggets of awesome, but they're hidden amongst great swathes of mediocrity, not to mention clunky language and inexplicable spelling.  They're the point where I wonder if I haven't maybe found myself in the wrong business, when after all I'd be much better suited to interior design or inventing new breakfast cereals.  But then I remember that clunky language can be tightened, spelling mistakes can be spotted, and really, just about any other first draft mistake can be fixed too.  Sometimes it's a matter of tidying and sometimes it's a matter of immense effort - I say this as someone who not so long ago changed the tense of an entire novel! - but the crucial point is that the end result is always better.

And that, ultimately, is the joy of the second draft.  The first time around you get to be intermittently good, maybe even intermittently great in small doses.  The second time around, if you're willing to put in the same level of energy all over again, you can nail it.  And then there's the third draft, which in my head is usually called the polish draft now, for obvious reasons: that's where the story begins to genuinely shine.  But the first step, I think, is just to get past that hurdle of thinking of the second draft as a chore, a hardship or some assault on your artistic integrity.  You want to tell a story?  You want it to be amazing?  Then the biggest advantage you have is that you don't have to be perfect the first time through.

Writing Ramble: Is Writing Fun?

Recently I had an interesting discussion with a couple of author friends, Andy Knighton and Charlotte Courtney-Bond, that began from my admitting I don't find writing to be all that fun.

When Andy and Charlotte very sensibly asked why I'd do it,  I explained that there are plenty of things I do get out of writing.  I love the constant challenge, the intellectual stimulation, the way no two projects are ever even slightly the same, and the fact that I'm always learning, be it real-world knowledge to enhance my work or just how to be better at what I do.  Writing is always interesting and sometimes thrilling, but that's a different thing entirely to being fun.

After consideration, Charlotte decided that she largely felt the same way; Andy wasn't convinced.

But is writing meant to be fun?  Perhaps when it's purely a hobby, and I certainly remember getting a certain enjoyment in the early days just from the sheer act of flinging words together in interesting and unlikely combinations.  Yet the minute you start doing something professionally, in however small a way, that inevitably changes.  Writing becomes a job, and though jobs can and probably should be fun, they also need to be other things: productive, profitable, demanding.  And even if you're not aiming to make money, most people write with the intention of producing something worthwhile, which implies a certain level of graft.

In fact, I'd suggest that it's dangerous even to expect that writing should be fun.  Because, as we hinted at in our discussion, the minute you bring those expectations, you put it up against many other fun things: playing games, watching TV, ten pin bowling, shark wrestling.  And writing is always going to struggle to compete, because when done seriously and well, it's bloody difficult.  (Admittedly, the same can be said for shark wrestling.)  If you expect writing to be stimulating and emotionally fulfilling then it will rarely let you down, but when you're asking it to be fun you're bound to be disappointed, because at its worst it's a process of beating your face against the keyboard until a load of stubborn words that would rather you sod off and die than come out finally agree to play ball.  In fact, at its very worst, writing can mean dredging through experiences you'd rather not imagine or relive, and then trying to transfer those shattering emotions onto a blank page.  Whatever the word for something like that is, it surely isn't fun.

Is that to say I don't enjoy writing?  Not at all, and I do, maybe more so now than ever.  My point is just that there are plenty of different ways in which to enjoy something.  To use a tenuous metaphor, for me it's been a bit like the development of a relationship.  At the start everything was crazy and exciting, every moment was precious and every slight crisis felt like the end of the world.  These days it's more like being comfortable in the company of a clever, knowledgeable, witty companion ... maybe me and writing don't hit the town so much, but that's not to say we don't get plenty out of our time together.

Of course, no amount of writing experience has weened me off my fondness of crap metaphors.

Anyway, I'd be intrigued to hear other writers' thoughts on this one.  Do you find writing fun?  If so, is it always fun?  Would you give it up if it wasn't?  And if not then do you get the same things out of it as I do or something altogether different?  Have I just been going about it wrong all this time?

Patchwerk News and Reviews

It's hard to believe that it's been more than a month since Patchwerk came out; it seems like it happened last week.  Mostly for that reason, I've been a bit remiss in talking about it here, and also completely oblivious to just how much me and other people were talking about it elsewhere.

There have, for instance, been quite a lot of reviews.  And the vast majority have been positive, too; all except one, in fact, which - and I swear I'm not making this up - I now can't find.  Anyway, what's perhaps more important is that the general response seems to be varying between quite and very positive.  For example, Publisher's Weekly suggested that Patchwerk "throws open a surreal and suspenseful hall of science fiction mirrors, and readers will enjoy watching Florrian smash through them all."  SF Bluestocking, despite a few reservations, described it as "a complete and mostly pleasant surprise" and an "an interestingly experimental work".  We The Nerdy gave up half way through their first reading and then revisited it, but still felt that Patchwerk was "a pretty fun little scifi story with solid action and a likeable protagonist" and still gave it 7.5 out of 10.

Back on a definitely positive note, SF Signal said that "it’s no small feat to write about the multiverse without confusing the reader, but Tallerman manages to do just that. I love the detailed “worlds” that each iteration inhabits, and not only is it an exciting read, the characters, which could have been two dimensional in order to facilitate the story, are more than that."  Elsewhere, Skiffy and Fanty suggested that "Tallerman does a great job of both narrowing the scope of the conflict ... and ... making it seem that the scope of the conflict is limitless. It’s an excellent balancing act", while Strange Alliances felt that "the story works extremely well but only because of David Tallerman’s competence as an author to keep it all together and continue to intrigue."  (Aw!)  Black Girl Nerds had a couple of issues but nevertheless felt that Patchwerk was "a very interesting read" and The Exploding Spaceship concluded that "Tallerman does an excellent riff on a clichéd plot device by turning it on its head. It is a very cleverly written and plotted story."  Overall, though, my favourite quote has to be from Megan Leigh's in-depth review at Pop-verse - that "...this is what science fiction writing should be."

Although, Andrew Knighton's claim that Patchwerk is the anti-Sliders comes a close second.

Elsewhere, I've been talking a great deal about the book - or in a couple of cases, failing entirely to talk about it.  On that note there were my two Tor.com blog posts, one of which involved praising Ian Sales's splendid conclusion to his Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows, and the other of which descended into my usual compulsive airing of my obsession with nineties anime!  At least I managed to stay on topic at SF Signal, talking about some of my favourite reality-bending genre fiction in an article titled Teasing the Seams of Reality.  I've also done a few interviews, swapping thoughts with My Bookish Ways about a whole bunch of stuff and settling once and for all with Andy Knighton who would win in a fight between Tolkien and Asimov.  (Hint: it wouldn't be Tolkien.)  I also did one of those old-style talky interviews with Mahvesh Murad of Midnight in Karachi, which once again ending up going spectacularly off-topic and, thanks to my crummy laptop, sounds like I was talking from the bottom of a well.

So if you haven't picked up a copy of Patchwerk yet, there's plenty of information out there to help you decide whether it's worth a look.  (It totally is.)  Or, if you wanted to wait, in a couple of weeks the fourth Tor.com bundle will be out, containing not only Patchwerk but Emily Foster's The Drowning Eyes and Matt Wallace's Lustlocked.  Alternatively, if you're really quick, you can win Patchwerk, along with all three Damasco books, here.  (Admittedly, at time of posting you have all of three hours!)  Lastly, you can always just buy it the old fashioned way - from Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

On a final note ... it may seem like a small thing, but reviews in places like Amazon and Goodreads can make all the difference between a book's success or failure, and whether I get to keep writing for a living depends in great part upon how well this little book does.  So if you've read and enjoyed Patchwerk then please think about taking a minute to slap up a review somewhere.  Trust me, every bit helps.

FantasyCon 2015

My first thought about this year's FantasyCon is that it was a whole 'nother experience going with friends - and, I've got to say, a wholly better one.  Last year at FantasyCon I met Andy Knighton and Charlotte Bond for the first time and this time around we all went together, and if nothing else I say here conveys a useful sense of what makes this particular convention stand out then that alone should do it: one year I made new friends, the next they were good enough friends that we were all comfortable with the idea of hanging out together for large portions of a weekend.  FantasyCon is a hit and miss affair, there's no doubt about that, but at its best, its somewhat smaller scale and more intimate vibe achieve great things that the bigger conventions frequently lack.

Me, John Connolly, Matthew Blakstad, A K Benedict, Guy Haley, Debbie Bennett

2015, it's fair to say, was FantasyCon at its best.  Not the perfect venue, by any means - the horror stories regarding food and drink were almost Nine Worlds-worthy! - but other than that, it's hard to pick on anything that wasn't either good or very good or really kind of marvelous.  And before I go any further, a shout-out to Richard Webb who did ninja work putting this stuff together well in advance.  And also, while I'm thinking, to those redcoats folks, who never once responded to my befuddled queries with "why the holy hell are you asking where room X is when you're standing right outside of room X and there's a big sign that says room X?"*

Soooooo ... even though we were there pretty much from the start, I only made the one panel on the Friday, and then it was mostly because I had friends on it, but Fae-Fi, Folk-Fum: Faerie & Folktale turned out to be an hour well spent, with a broad range of opinions bringing some new perspective to a rather well-worn subject.  (This, by the way, sums up all the panels I attended nicely: no mind-blowingly original topics, but an interesting range of panelists and some productive debates.  In my ideal world, panels would be a lot more like Tarantino movies, but I realise that's not likely to happen any time soon.)

With the remainder of Friday largely taken up by being lazy and hanging out with friends and listening to karoake - no, that wasn't me singing along to Let it Go, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar - I managed to get to bed at an only slightly stupid time.  Saturday was the closest I had to a work day, which as it turned out, wasn't that close at all.  I'd been quite chilled about my panel Is It Legit? Crime in Fantasy, Horror and SF until I realised that I was moderating in the largest (by quite a margin) of the three rooms and that THERE WAS NO COFFEE TO BE HAD ANYWHERE IN THE CONFERENCE CENTRE.  There wasn't much anyone could do about the former, but at least I was saved on the latter front by the magnificent Peter Newman, who basically made it his mission to save my coffee-starved life.  (He must never know that immediately afterwards I discovered that there was free coffee in the green room, and that it was much better than the slush the hotel were selling for ohsomuch money.)  Anyway, once I was suitably caffeinated, my panel seemed to go well enough.  And by the end I was particularly grateful to superstar guest of honour John Connolly, who can talk the legs off any quadruped mammal you could possibly throw his way but is also polite enough to let other people have their say, which from a moderating point of view basically makes him the perfect panelist.  (Though everyone, it has to be said, did sterling work.)

Having spent a large part of the remainder of the day loitering in the bar recovering from the very mild trauma of persuading authors to talk about author-stuff, I braved some more panels in the afternoon - YA: Why, eh? and Robots, Beasts & Humanimals: Writing Non-Human Characters, in close succession.  They were both solid, but two panels in a row turned out to be my limit for sitting in a room listening to people who aren't me talking, so I took a fresh air break, which frustratingly meant missing Tea and Jeopardy for about the thousand time running.  (One day I will experience Tea and Jeopardy.  This I swear upon the bones of someone or other's ancestors!)  Instead I ducked out to hunt up some food that wasn't microwaved by apathetic bar staff and then wandered back in time for my reading - which nearly no one turned up for, despite my copious hinting.  (Needless to say, thanks to the little circle who did.)  From there I moved on to the Undertow Publications book launch to celebrate the launch of Skein and Bone, the debut collection by V H Leslie, who I'd met over breakfast that morning.  This turned out to be an unexpected highlight, since not only was everyone involved really nice, there was free sangria.  That done, I drank an unwise amount and hung out with many more tremendous people, some of whom I knew and some I didn't, and finally staggered off bedwards.

Sunday morning saw me torn between Andy Knighton on the Chained to the Desk? The Writer’s Life Under the Microscope panel and Ian Sales on The Future of the Future, and in the end I opted for the former because it was Andy's first F'Con panel.  Then I decided to ask the question I'd prepped for Ian on Andy's panel, despite how it wouldn't have made a damn bit of sense.  Then I wimped out and asked a sensible question instead - well, one about juggling, at any rate.  Still, it was a good discussion, and no one mentioned going to work in a dressing gown, so perhaps we're progressing as a society.

And that was about the end of it.  If I were to grumble about one thing, and this is me so of course I am, it's that Sunday at a FantasyCon always feels like a bit of a wash-out.  It occurred to me for the first time that there's something slightly horrid and divisive about the notion of ending a conference with a banquet that half the attendees can't afford to go to, and I live in hope that that whole thing will die a death in the not too distant future.  But in this case it was a small deal indeed, because we wanted to get off early and the fact that the programming had finished and almost no one was around by one in the afternoon made that inordinately easy.  Which in turn meant getting back at a sensible time, which in turn seems to have alleviated the usual Con' lag and left me - after two days of considerably too much alcohol, too little proper food and definitely too little sleep - with much more energy than I had before.  Weird but true.

Meanwhile, next year brings FantasyCon back to the hallowed fields of Yorkshire, in the shape of FantasyCon by the Sea, and this of course is an immeasurably good thing.  I'll hope to see you there.




* There wasn't actually a room X.  I would have forgiven the venue everything, even their weird notions of what to put on pizza, if there had been.

Now With Added Art

A grumpy turtle.

It's fair to say I've wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, but that doesn't mean it's always been the only - or indeed the main - thing that I wanted to do with my life.  In my teens, if you'd asked me then I would have mentioned writing definitely, but I'd have probably talked more about wanting to be an artist.  For that was my dream when I was growing up, and if it hadn't been for our glorious educational system - whereby, thanks to some bafflingly half-assed non-teaching, my strongest subject managed to be the only one I failed - it's probably what I'd be doing now.

Still, I'm not bitter.  Well, I am a bit, I failed goddamn GCSE Art because my school couldn't provide a teacher and it affected the entire trajectory of my future, but I'm not that bitter.  Because I love being a writer, and if you asked me to choose between the two - which I guess life sort of did - then I'd choose writing hands down.  However what would have been really neat would have been not to have to choose, and it soon became apparent that that wasn't a realistic possibility.  For the last few years, writing has been a full-time hobby performed around full-time jobs, and it barely left room for things like eating and sleeping, let alone picking up my art again.

A creepy child and creepy standing stones.

But I was always determined that I would.  In fact, looking back, that it was one of the many reasons I was so desperate to get to this point of writing full time: with writing a job rather than a sideline I could go back to being able to have actual hobbies, I could pick up art where I'd left off, and maybe in the long term I could see what might have been.

Only when the time came it was kind of scary ... because what if I'd lost whatever bit of talent I'd had?  I literally hadn't done more than doodle in ten years, and though people would occasionally point out that those doodles were quite nice, my own feeling was that I was struggling to draw a straight line, let alone anything that actually looked like anything.  Obviously then, the logical thing to do was to start with something really difficult.  Like a turtle, say.  Like the one up in the top right.   But, while it took me about two whole months, it did work out better than I'd dared hope.  And since then I've had a picture on the go pretty much constantly; it's staying as a hobby because, hey, that was pretty much the whole point, but it's been one I'm getting an awful lot out of.

Anyway, my existing impetus got a healthy push when I got talking to Mhairi Simpson at Fantasycon and was forced into playing her work-in-progress storytelling card game Be the Bard, despite my protests that telling stories is my day job and I was supposed to be on a break from all that, and also that I was pretty damn drunk.  And lo and behold, it was rather fun - but mainly I got distracted by the cards and the pictures on the cards and the possibility of getting to draw some of those pictures and how fun that would be.  And then I bugged Mhairi to let me do just that, which it turned out she was okay with, enough so that she promptly set me a few to work on ... like that scene with the standing stones up there.  I'm up to four designs right now, and it's great having someone actually asking me to draw things, so that I'd don't just stick with what I know or feel comfortable with.  (Which, by the way, also explains the unicorn.)

A penguin.  No, wait!  A bad-ass unicorn.

Now normally the blog is about writing and this post hasn't been at all, but there are some writing points to be made here, so let's finish up with those.  Or I could just point you to a recent blog post by Andrew Knighton, which says most of what I'd want to say.  But the gist is this: writing, if you put aside the manual dexterity required to hit keys / manipulate a pen / burn words onto a page with only the searing power of your mutant brain, is basically head work, and you can live in your head too much.  Every writer should have a hobby that isn't writing, and it's probably a good move to go for something that requires entirely different parts of your body and mind.  Which works for me, because what I'm discovering is that drawing compliments writing tremendously well, in that it's training me to look harder and in different ways at things I thought I understood - to literally see things anew, using whole other parts of my brain.  This, surely, is a good thing. 

And maybe, just maybe, if I work hard enough for long enough, one day I will be good enough to pass GCSE Art!  Hey, anyone can dream...