Five things I want to write

Strange Ink's list caught my eye and got me thinking. I know bucket lists are fashionable these days, but I don't have one. I am actually very bad at long-term planning, setting goals, etc. -- they don't interest me much. I always get distracted and wander off in some other direction.

But I'm posting this one publicly, so let's see what happens.

Van Gogh's Trees and Undergrowth, just because it's a fave

1. High fantasy -- from the mentor's point of view
Because I find myself sympathizing with older characters, as I'm getting older, and their trials and tribulations trying to steer a bunch of starry-eyed youngsters toward saving the world. No wonder they die halfway through. It's exhaustion, I'm telling you.

2. Fables from an invented world
That highly stylized voice, the mythic characters... but not our fairy tales. I want to write the stories that the main character of Disciple is going to tell her baby at bedtime. I got a name, the other day: the Red Hunter of the Winter Wood.

3. Aliens
It may sound odd given my love of science fiction, but something in my gut balks at creating aliens. They're so often used as stand-ins for the monster under the bed, for other human beings, or for deities... I want to coax my gut into telling me what it wants in an alien race, and write a story with them.

4. High hermetic magic
This may be a side-effect of playing White Wolf's World of Darkness system back in the day, but for me "hermetic" magic is that massively organized, anal-retentive down to the microscopic detail, putting science to shame with its rigor, brand of magic. My gut has always said that scientific rigor should be applicable to a magic system, and I'd like to give it free rein.

5. Utopia
You know what would be tough to write? Utopia. And I don't mean a crust of utopia maintained by some horrible dystopic mechanism that the characters will fall into. That's been done, and done well. I mean an honest-to-God clean-livin' utopia. What would the conflict be?

That's a long shot, but hey. You won't improve your aim if you only shoot at things in arm's reach.

What's on your to-write list?

Homework addendum

One more.

Debra Doyle, Ph.D.
I was recently reminded that Dr. Doyle offers freelance editorial services at a rate of $1,000 for an 80-100k novel -- which is competitive. Rates for shorter or longer novels are negotiable, and she has a short story/first chapter only rate also.

She needs no vouchsafe from Absolute Write, for me, because she's one of the instructors at the Viable Paradise workshop that I attended in October 2011. I would gladly sell the car and hitchhike to Martha's Vinyard to sit at her feet for another week.

The deadline to apply for VP 2012 is coming up fast -- June 15th -- so if you've been thinking about submitting GO FOR IT. If you don't have anything ready START PREPPING FOR NEXT YEAR.

See the rest of my self-publishing homework here.

Researching freelance editorial services

If you just Google for editorial services, you'll get a lot of hits. Who are these people? Do they have a clue? Will they steal your manuscript?

Even if they list testimonials on their site, you have no idea if those are real. You need the word of someone you trust.

When I went looking for recommendations I could trust, I went to Absolute Write. I've been a member there for a while now, though I don't drop by as often as I should. It's an independent forum with a large membership that ranges from complete beginners to professionals with many years of experience in the industry.

If you're looking for a crit partner, writing advice, experts in nearly any field, or you just want to talk about your favorite genre, it's a great place. 

One of their best services is the Bewares, Recommendations and Background Check forum wherein you can learn about just about any agent, publisher, or freelancer out there. I crawled through that forum vetting each of the companies that came up in Google, as self-imposed homework for publishing myself.

And I'm going to let you steal my homework. These four companies are my short list for editing Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet.

The Editorial Department
Offers manuscript critique, line editing, and publishing services for fiction and non-fiction. I was most interested in the proofing and line editing, at 2 to 6 cents a word, and the manuscript evaluation at 0.8 cents a word. They'll annotate the manuscript for 1.2 cents a word.

Editing For Authors
Offers comprehensive editing at 1.7 cents a word and proofreading at 0.9 cents a word. Publishing services too.

Cornerstones
Based in the UK. They also work with writing for children. Their prices convert to a bit lower than the above two, actually, though some of their rates are hourly. And you have to send them a query.

The Book Doctors
This site was well spoken of on Absolute Write, but their list of services is more vague. They offer consultations as time blocks: 15 minutes for $90, 30 for $150, an hour for $250.

Addendum to the short list.

Plot surgery on the fly

I was going to send my fantasy characters on a hunt. If you've been following my Pinterest picture board, you've seen the handful of hunting-related photos I've been staring at.

Hunts, in stories, are usually where an accident (which always turns out to not be an accident) happens and somebody dies. I wasn't going to do that, but I got to within a couple scenes of sending them out into the woods and... my gut told me we don't need this, it'll only get in the way.

A clean snick of a sword and the hunt didn't happen. On further reflection, here's how I know my gut is right:

Cutting it has zero impact on the plot
Which was a dead give-away that the scenes were useless. They mainly addressed relationship development. And even then...

Cutting it has almost zero impact on the character arcs
Almost zero. There's one relationship that will need more work, as a result of the cut, but it's not my first-person narrator's relationship so it wasn't the main focus in any case. My narrator can see other parts of that relationship happening in other contexts, though. I'm confident I can get it in someplace. But most importantly...

It would've promised something I wasn't going to deliver on
Unlike real life, fiction is supposed to make sense. And as much as I dislike Chekhov's law (because it makes story-telling predictable) everybody knows it on a gut level and readers expect that topics introduced have a reason to be there.

The topic doesn't have to be tied to the plot, but the more time you spend on it the more expectations get attached to it. Just seeing a gun doesn't have to mean someone will get shot. It could be a piece of character history or world-building. Characters could talk about the gun in order to develop that. I would have no problem with the gun then being put on the mantle and never touched again.

But if a character takes it down and loads it, now you're committed to using it. If someone notices it's missing, it had better turn up in a significant way.

My hunting scene would have spent time on something that would not have later turned up in a significant way. I don't intend to be a sloppy writer, so snick. Gone.

What do you think of Chekhov's law?