When you've finished writing a story, cut it by 10%

You've finished writing a new story. You've rewritten and edited the story to the best of your abilities. You've received detailed critiques and incorporated that feedback. You've worked so hard on the story that you want to simply submit the damn thing and never look at it again.

Congratulations. Now's the time to cut 10% of the story's word count.

Before you scream and apply a baseball bat to my head, hear me out.

When an author rewrites and edits a story, the temptation is to add words. All authors have experienced this. There you are, doing rewrites and clarifying some jumbled exposition or giving more depth to a character interaction or explaining exactly who is speaking in that confusing scene with twenty characters engaging in a spirited dialog about the best way to murder an author. So you do all this and bam, your story has jumped by several thousand in the word count.

And that's perfectly okay. If you need more words to tell your story, then use them. That's what words are for. To tell stories.

But once all the rewriting and editing are complete and you feel that the story is finished, that's a great time to see what you can do to simplify the story. And a good way to do this is to set a 10% goal for cutting words from your story.

I've been doing this recently with my fiction and I've found this 10% goal forces an author to consider both the minutia of what you've written and the larger parts of your story. Is that flowery sentence really necessary? Is that minor plot device, which needs a long info dump to explain, essential to the story? Do you really need all those adjectives and adverbs and phrases?

As you go through your story cutting what isn't absolutely needed you'll find that a stronger story quickly emerges. This is often because less is more (unless you're actually using cliches like that in your story, in which case consider my advice to not cliche yourself into being a hack writer).

And before you think this is merely my advice, note that Stephen King gives similar advice in On Writing. According to King, one of the early critiques he received stated the following: "Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%."

So the next time you finish a story, go back and try cutting 10%. I think you'll be happy with the result.

An engaged fandom means "No Award" won’t kill the Hugos

My thoughts on the current state of Hugo Awards voting and PuppyFail:

WorldCon surge points to engaged fandom

As Tempest Bradford points out, there are now over 8,000 members of Sasquan. This year's Worldcon has gained 2,600 supporting memberships alone since the Puppy-dominated list of Hugo nominees were announced on March 31.

I agree with Tempest that most of these new Worldcon members are likely people outraged by how the Puppies politicized the Hugos. I also agree with David Gerrold's view that what we're seeing here is an energized fandom deciding to again take part in voting for the Hugo Awards. If this turns out to be the case, fandom will owe an ironic "thank you" to the Puppies for increasing interest in the Hugos.

Of course, I suspect the Puppies won't be happy with what this energized fandom means for their movement. But they should have thought about that before they embarked on their campaign.

No Award won’t mean the death of the Hugos

With voting for the Hugo Awards now open I'm hearing through private messages and on social media how many people have voted. Based on these comments it appears “No Award” is poised to do very well. In fact, I’d be surprised if No Award didn’t win several categories, notably the Novella, Novelette and Short Story categories, along with other categories where the Puppy slates make up all the nominees.

Despite what the Puppies will try to say if No Award wins, this doesn’t result from some organized attack on their slate. Instead, most Hugo voters appear to be reading the nominees and deciding that many of them are not worthy of being on the final ballot. A smaller group of voters appear to be voting No Award because they dislike how the Hugos were politicized.

One of the strengths of the Hugo Awards has always been how voters punish stories and works which were placed on the ballot through political maneuvering and campaigning. We saw this in the 1987 Hugo Awards for Best Novel, where Black Genesis by L. Ron Hubbard made the final ballot through political campaigning. End result: Hubbard's novel placed sixth in the voting, behind No Award.

We appear to be seeing a repeat of what happened in 1987. And the good news is that a more engaged fandom, as indicated by Worldcon membership numbers, not only means that people are rejecting PuppyFail, they'll also make it harder for the Puppies to game the Hugo nomination process in future years. That means any threats to destroy the Hugos if No Award wins will turn out to be meaningless.

A future "Anti-Puppy Hugo Award" movement?

And here’s an interesting thought — even if No Award ends up winning many categories, that doesn’t mean 2014 SF/F works will never be honored by the Hugos.

Worldcon currently gives out retro Hugos for past conventions where Hugo Awards weren’t originally awarded (usually because hosting the awards was initially optional for Worldcons). Here's my prediction: If No Award sweeps many of the award categories, we'll eventually see a movement to award Hugos to those works denied consideration because of the Puppy campaign. After all, the retro Hugos were voted on and approved by Worldcon members. A similar method to "correct" any No Award winners could also be approved years from now.

Of course, the downside is that it'll take decades for this to happen. But I doubt future Worldcons members will allow a giant hole of No Award to forever exist in the list of Hugo winners.

My story "Heaven's Touch" in Escape Pod

My science fiction story "Heaven's Touch" has launched in the latest episode of Escape Pod. Blast over there and listen. Many thanks to the Escape Pod editors for selecting it and to Marguerite Kenner for narrating it.

"Heaven's Touch" is a hard science fiction story set on a comet in the near future. The story was originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction and was named to the Locus 2012 Recommended Reading List.

Like most things in life, Peace Corps is all about relationships

My students at Sa Klee Wittaya School during morning assembly.

One of the best experiences of my life was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand. I worked as a TEFL/Crossover volunteer, meaning I taught English in a Thai secondary school and also worked on other projects such as AIDs awareness campaigns and teacher trainings.

I don't pretend that organizations like the Peace Corps are the solution to all the world's problems — as with most things in life, there are limitations and issues to what any one organization or person can do to improve the world. Still, there is a strong value to the Peace Corps and similar programs because of the relationships people build between themselves and others around the world. These relationships are what can truly improve our world.

When people consider the Peace Corps, they often think of volunteers serving under hardship conditions as they dig wells and build bridges. But not only is this stereotype almost always wrong, it ignores how the most important thing Peace Corps Volunteers build are actually relationships. That's why relationship building is at the heart of two of the three Peace Corps mission goals.

I've been thinking about the Peace Corps recently because several of my former students have contacted me through Facebook. As I'm saying — it's all about relationships.

Here's a humorous essay I wrote a while back about my Peace Corps experience, in which I address the stereotypes of Peace Corps service while also pointing out the importance of relationships.


Not So Posh Corps

My students walking over the bridge in our village during a ceremony. The sign says Sa Klee Wittaya, the name of their school.

When I told my friend Mark that I'd joined the Peace Corps, he high-fived me and whooped with excitement. However, he wasn't excited about me working for global understanding, sustainable development, or world peace.

No, he only cared about my future hardships.

You see, Mark was a Peace Corps' legend. While serving as a forestry volunteer in rural Nepal, he broke his leg and hiked two days across isolated mountains to get help. Then, with his leg still in a cast, he hiked back to his post, planting little tree seedlings on Nepal's denuded hills and valleys as he went. The fact that I'd work under similar conditions impressed him.

Then he found out I was going to Thailand.

"That's like going to Club Med," he sneered. "What are you going to do, build toilets for deprived beach tourists?"

Actually, the term among Peace Corps Volunteers for the Thailand assignment was Posh Corps, not Club Med, and neither slur was applicable to my volunteer site. I ended up teaching English at a junior high school in the central Thai village of Sa Klee. Located next to a slow flowing river, Sa Klee had been ground zero for a massive shoe factory employing 15,000 people. The contrast between the peaceful tree-filled village and the vast factory and ramshackle apartments a thousand feet away was like Chicago being compressed beside a tiny Amish community. The landscape both soothed and jarred the senses.

But try explaining this to Mark. To him, the fact that Sa Klee had electricity and a few old computers made it unsuitable for Peace Corps. One of my friends at Sa Klee, a older teacher named Loong Chian, found Mark's attitude both silly and insulting.

"So helping people isn't enough," he said once. "But if you were wading through crocodile and leech infested rivers without reason, then you'd be a real volunteer?"

I explained in Thai that Americans sometimes obsessed on the wrong things in life. Loong Chian laughed as if this wasn't a secret to anyone.

During my second year in Thailand, Sa Klee flooded. Of course this interested Mark.

I lived in teacher housing while at Sa Klee school. This is my house during the annual floods — the infamous sewer pipe can be seen beneath the house behind the drying clothes. At this point the floods were still rather low. In the following weeks the floods would rise and overflow the dike protecting the school.

"What do you do?" he e-mailed me. "Wade to and from your house?"

My answer: Yes. Unlike in America — where every time a flood came around millions of dollars in damage was done to the homes of people who'd foolishly built right next to a river — people in Thailand built homes to survive the floods. At my school, all of the wood-plank teacher's houses sat on tall cement poles so the floods passed underneath without damage.

No damage, that is, until my toilet stopped up.

I first noticed the problem a month into the floods. One day the toilet just refused to flow. Loong Chian came by to help me fix it.

"The problem comes from air trapped in the septic tank," he said as we squatted on my staircase and gazed under the house. Flood waters rippled around the blue PVC pipe going from my bathroom to the septic tank. A smaller pipe hung loose beside the blue pipe.

"When they put in the new pipe, they didn't attach the exhaust valve," Loong Chian said, handing me an electric drill. "Drill a new hole and attach the smaller pipe."

"Don't we need a boat?" I asked in Thai.

"Too difficult. Just swim out in the water and make sure the drill doesn't get wet."

The students in one of my classes.

I fingered the frayed cord of the drill. Thailand electricity ran at a powerful 220 volts. It'll fry you faster than anything. Just ask Thomas Merton, the deceased trappist monk and author of The Seven Storey Mountain, who discovered while on a trip to the Thai kingdom that bathtubs and electric fans don't mix.

"Don't worry," Loong Chian said. "I'll stand by the outlet and pull the plug . . . if anything goes wrong."

He was disappointed I didn't trust him. After debating differing views on electrical safety without agreement, Loong Chian came up with another idea. He found a metal bolt and heated it over my propane cooking stove until one side glowed red hot.

"Melt through the sewage pipe," he said, "then attach the exhaust valve."

Easy enough. I swam to the pipe, holding the hot bolt above my head.

I should have suspected trouble when Loong Chian yelled for his wife to come watch me fix the pipe. As they sat on the stairs, I pushed the exhaust valve against the sewage pipe, marked its spot with a wet thumbprint, then shoved the hot bolt into the PVC. The plastic bubbled and oozed.

Suddenly, explosion! The bolt shot into the water with a spitting halo of muck that rainbowed the morning sun. Tissue and unknown particles clung to my lips and face. I looked like some cartoon villain just emerging from the sewers.

"Maybe the hole's not big enough," Loong Chain said as he laughed. "Do it again! Do it again!"

I ignored him. After attaching the exhaust pipe I took a long swim in the river.

When I e-mailed Mark about all this, he was finally impressed. "Now you're a true Peace Corps volunteer," he replied.

I wasn't a true plumber, though — a few days later my toilet stopped up again. Loong Chian said that was typical of life. He also suggested that I join him and his wife on their upcoming trip to the beach. "Just until the floods recede," he added with a smile.

But I didn't tell Mark about my beach trip. After all, I had a reputation to protect, what with me now being a true Peace Corps volunteer.

When science fiction authors are no longer grounded in reality

There used to be a time when science fiction authors were grounded in reality. Even if their SF flirted with or flew past certain aspects of the real universe, they still knew what reality was.

But now? It's amazing how many SF authors not only don't understand what reality is, they wouldn't recognize it if it kicked them in the butt.

I say this because of a statement from science fiction author John Ringo, which is as divorced from reality as anything to come out of the recent Hugo/Puppy funfest. In a Facebook post titled "Understanding SJW logic and why it is destroying science fiction," Ringo makes a number of statements which defy what actually exists in the real world. Perhaps that's why he ended up making the post unavailable to the public (but not before it was screencapped into immortality  — thanks to Dara at Crime and the Forces of Evil for saving this.)

There are many wrong statements in Ringo's post, but perhaps the most unreal statement is what Ringo offers as his proof that everything he says is correct.

Ringo's proof is this supposed statement of fact about science fiction:

"Every single (publishing) house in the industry has seen a continuous drop in sales dating back to the '70s when social agenda fiction became mainstreamed and everyone jumped on the 'New Wave' (early version of SJW) bandwagon.

"Baen, which only publishes cracking good tales, has seen a continuous increase. Across the board. Not one or two best selling titles. (Which are never SJW, by the way.)"

Let me put this delicately: WRONG WRONG WRONG! AND WHAT WORLD ARE YOU ACTUALLY LIVING IN?

First off all, if what Ringo says was true why would science fiction have first begun hitting the bestseller lists in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Those were the decades when Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and many other top SF authors landed massive advances and sales for their novels. Most of which, I should note, were not published by Baen, which wasn't even founded until 1983.

But we don't have to go back to the '70s and '80s to prove Ringo wrong. For example, the April 2015 Locus Bestseller List had only one Baen title on it (which is Ringo's Strands of Sorrow, which debuted at number 5 on the list). That's one title out of 25 novels on the different Locus Bestseller categories for April. The March 2015 list had no Baen titles and neither did the February 2015 list. The January 2015 list had a single Baen title on it.

A similar pattern emerges from the last few years of the Locus Bestseller lists, which cover genre sales in the hardback, paperback and trade paperback formats. For example, during 2014 Baen placed the following number of bestsellers on the Locus lists each month:

Bear in mind each month these lists feature at least 25 novels across the different publishing formats. So if Baen had a single genre novel on the list for a particular month, that means there were 24 other bestsellers released by other genre publishers. And while not all of these are science fiction, many of them are.

And yes, a similar pattern holds up for the last few years. Don't take my word on this — feel free to search through all the recent Locus Bestseller Lists.

And it's not just the number of bestsellers which matters in determining how well a publisher does, it's also how often a specific title appears on the bestseller lists. All of the Baen titles which appear on the 2014 monthly Locus Bestseller lists are only on the list for a single month. That indicates each title had strong initial sales but couldn't hold those sales to make multiple monthly bestseller lists. Contrast this with the books from other publishers which made multiple Locus lists. One example of this is Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, published by Orbit, which made the Locus Trade Paperback Bestseller lists for 9 different months during 2014.

And it isn't only the bestseller lists showing this pattern — all of this is backed by sales figures from Bookscan, the publishing industry's system for tracking book sales.

My point here isn't it to disparage Baen. They publish good novels which many people enjoy reading (including myself). But to say they are the only publisher with continually increasing sales is wrong especially when you see how many other genre publishers place multiple bestsellers on the Locus lists month after month.

I raised a similar issue a few weeks ago when I examined the Bookscan numbers of all the Hugo and Nebula Award finalists. My point then was that there are plenty of people reading books from all sides of the genre's current political divide. I believe my point is still valid and supported by strong evidence.

If you are going to make a provocative statement like Ringo's, you need to back up your words with, you know, some facts. You need to show that you actually understand reality and aren't simply saying whatever pops into your head.

Unfortunately, John Ringo's statement about Baen seeing a continual increase in sales compared to other publishing houses — which implies that no one is reading science fiction from any publishing house not called Baen — doesn't stand up to the facts.


Update: I should add that my analysis of publishers' sales based on bestseller lists and Bookscan numbers isn't perfect. Ideally I'd love to have access to all sales numbers (including ebooks) from all publishers, but there's no way to access that information. But if Baen's sales had been continually increasing for decades while every other publishers' sales were declining, which is Ringo's assertion, then we'd see evidence of this in the bestseller lists. Instead, what the lists show is that SF novels from all publishers are doing very well.