This was my third FoF and it didn’t disappoint… again. I attended panels starting Friday afternoon well into the evening and the spend 12 hours both Saturday an Sunday (at least) frantically scribbling notes, listening, and learning. Probably my 3 favorite panels were the two that talked about the short fiction markets (Neil Clarke was in both, as was Scot Noel and David Steffen) and the one about how you need to consider the infrastructure of your world (water, waste, air handling) but you don’t necessarily need to describe it all. There was also a panel on space fantasy and the more I think about my WIP the more I think it fits there instead of hard space opera. I don’t know. My novel is supposed to be gritty and hard and it is expansive and space opera-y like the Expanse, but there are elements that transcend hard SF. I guess it is going to be hard to categorize.
After the con was over I posted in my writing club’s discord (the semisages of the pages!) the following:
That was a frantic 52 hours. I did get sleep both nights. I think my main takeaways are these:
- don’t self reject. Submit. (Aka, play the rejection race)*
- don’t take long breaks. Try to write most days, even for a few minutes. And leave breadcrumbs to get going easier next time†
- don’t take rejections personally.
- don’t hang on to your work so tightly. Write it. Let it sit for a few days (shorts) or months (longer), do a major round of revision, get a beta read, revise, and get it out. That’s the only way to “win.” (I know for me personally, I have 12-15 stories in various stages of development. I need to just take them, polish them, and submit them). It is the process that makes you get better. However, I really struggle still. I am still so new at this and don’t know always what to do.
- And the last one: write shorts. Use prompts. Just get an idea, write the hell out of it, and be done. Don’t be emotionally connected to it. Learn craft by doing, practicing. You will get better. And then repeat. And keep submitting. Editors want new stories, fresh ideas, they want to be drawn in, to interesting characters, worlds, settings, plots. Make them excited to read your stuff.‡
*The rejection race is a contest we have where we log our rejections of short fiction, queries, contests, workshops. the goal is to normalize rejection, celebrate us getting the work out there into the world.
†this actually came up in one of the panels I was in… dealing with anxiety, overwork, the pandemic. To make it easier to keep going, at the end of each writing session summarize your work you did that day, including what you are thinking about and where you should go next. Even cut your writing off mid-sentence.
‡I recently got some creativity cards (the Story Engine deck) to spark my creativity and I can see using this to force myself to write more regularly on stories I have less emotional connection to… to make it easier to get out there.
One last thing from the convention, the keynote speaker was Tobias Buckell, and I had the great fortune to sit in on a creativity workshop he ran. He taught us some ways to unlock creativity by reimagining tropes so that they are not cliches. That is relatively difficult to describe but the other thing he showed us was to ask questions to dig deeper. For example, the first thing that pops into your head when you are asked to write a ”dragon story” is probably similar to what other people think. So ask questions. Why is the dragon angry? Because he stubbed his toe. How did he stub his toe? Chasing the knight. Why was he chasing the knight? Because the knight dropped his beanstalk seed… and see, just quickly faking it there I found a way to have a (perhaps) more creative dragon story. Definitely some tools to consider. He also recommended describing your home town or some small thing or experience that only you had… to make it come alive for you. Then, you will know how much detail you would need to add for a fictional piece… how much you would need to describe to make it come alive for your reader.
The last thing I’ll say is that I volunteered (I just sent back my evaluation and suggestion form) to do a panel on chemistry and fiction next year. Hopefully I can find a friend who wants to do it with me. Many people find chemistry scary, but there are so many cool applications of chemistry and I would love to see more chemistry in fiction. I could describe current cutting edge problems, the 10-12 ”Holy Grails” of chemistry that were published about 25 and then about 5 years ago, and some cool new materials that I know about. That would be fun.
Until next time.