Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 2

James D. Macdonald

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For all the loyal readers of Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, here's a coupon for Witch Garden and Other Stories, a collection of some of our works in electronic form. The code is: UE28S

The code will be good for a month. Get the book for free.

It's okay to tell your friends and pass along the code.

 

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Prologues? Hell yes!

I've committed prologue.

Here is the prologue from Starpilot's Grave:

Prologue
Pleyver: Flatlands

Darkness had fallen over the city. Light from the streetlamps lay in stark white circles against the warehouse walls, with pools of blackness falling in between. Overhead, the fixed star of High Station--Pleyver's giant orbiting spaceport--burned down through the skyglow. No one saw Owen Rosselin-Metadi pass by like an unheeded thought, skirting the edges of the lamplight and pausing to catch his breath in the safety of the dark.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been running. Hours, it felt like--ever since leaving his sister back at Florrie's Place, in an upper room where the acrid stink of blaster fire mingled with the heavier smell of blood. He didn't think anybody had followed him out of there; he'd put most of his remaining energy into staying unseen, and Beka had taken care of the rest.

Owen didn't like the favor he'd asked from her, that she take on the risk of drawing away the armed pursuit, and he didn't particularly like himself for asking it. But Bee was a survivor, the kind who could fight her way from Florrie's to the port quarter and blast off leaving a legend behind her. He'd seen that much clearly; far more clearly, in fact, than the outcome of his own business on Pleyver.

Nevertheless, he had lied to her.

Well, not exactly lied. But he had let her think that the datachip he'd given her, packed with information from the locked comp-files of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., was unique. He'd never mentioned the other datachip, the one that he'd come to Pleyver to obtain. The information on the second chip belonged to Errec Ransome, Master of the Adepts' Guild--or it would if Owen lived long enough to deliver it.

Maybe I should have given it to Bee.

Owen shook his head. He'd briefly considered asking her, but the presence of her copilot had killed that idea. The slight, grey-haired man she called the Professor gave Beka an unquestioning loyalty--that much Owen had perceived without any difficulty--but it was a loyalty that would put Beka first and the Adepts' Guild a far-distant second.

No, it was better to let the two of them go their own way. From the look of things, Beka had kept her promise to distract the ordinary hired help, the ones who did their fighting with blasters and energy lances. Dodging the others should have been easy, if only he hadn't been so stupid as to get caught once already tonight....

#

Owen had shown up outside the portside branch office of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., just before dusk. He'd hoped to get there earlier, but intercepting Beka at the spaceport and convincing her to abandon her own designs on the company's data banks had taken longer than he'd anticipated.

Beka wanted revenge, plain and simple: revenge on whoever had planned their mother's assassination and revenge on whoever had paid for it. She'd get it, too; Bee in pursuit of a goal had a straightforward single-mindedness that made a starship's jump-run to hyperspace look like a sightseeing trip. But that same trait could make her dangerous to be around if your purposes and hers happened to diverge. Owen didn't think that the Guild's interest in FIL was going to put him in Beka's way, but he didn't want to chance it.

Besides, he reflected as he approached the grey, slab-sided FIL Building, it was easier for one person to work unnoticed than for two. He could slip in, get enough from the files to satisfy Master Ransome and his sister both, and slip out again before Bee was through eating dinner.

The front door of the building was secured by an electronic ID-scan. Owen palmed the lockplate like any authorized visitor. Inside the mechanism, the electric current flowed through its appointed paths and channels as the door made ready to reject the identification. Then, without changing his expression or his physical posture, Owen reached out, using the skills that for more than ten years had made him Errec Ransome's most valued--and most valuable--apprentice.

The flow of electrons altered its course. The lock clicked quietly and the door slid open.

A stranger waited in the unlit lobby, a thin, hunched man in the plain garb of a low-level office worker. Owen tensed, but the man didn't make any threatening moves.

"I've got the password," the worker said.

Owen paused. He hadn't expected anyone to be here at all. But he hadn't sensed any wrongness as he approached the office building, and the man himself didn't project any great amount of menace either.

He must be one of Bee's contacts, Owen decided. He's certainly the type--his coverall might as well have a tag on it saying "Disaffected Employee."

"Well?" he said aloud.

The man licked his lips. "We need to talk about the money first."

Money . . . Owen knew he shouldn't feel surprised. His sister was a merchant-captain, and dealt in the purchase and sale of whatever goods might find a market. But when Owen worked, as now, in the persona of a down-at-the-heels drifter, he carried as little cash as possible. A spaceport bum with money was a contradiction in terms.

"I'm just the messenger boy," Owen said. "You can pick up your fee at the General Delivery office." In addition to handling electronic and hardcopy messages, local branches of the giant communications firm made convenient, no-questions-asked cash drops for all sorts of legal and semilegal business exchanges. "I'm not authorized to carry cash."

He braced himself for an objection, and made ready to counter it in much the same way as he had dealt with the door. He was mildly surprised when the man only nodded, said, "Right," and began fishing in the pockets of his coat.

After a few seconds, the man came up with a thin slice of plastic. "The password's on here."

He held out the keycard. Owen reached out a hand to take the card, and felt the first undefined stirrings of premonition as their fingers touched.

Something's wrong. He ought to have made a fuss about the money.

Owen looked at the man again, this time using the physical contact to enhance his perceptions.

Under that deeper scrutiny, the patterns of the office worker's consciousness showed up like a dark and knotted skein, with fear and duplicity and greed tangled into an unlovely network.

Now I see it. He doesn't mind that he might not get Bee's money. Somebody else has already paid him more.

Owen smiled inwardly, though the face he presented to the office worker never changed. Sister mine, it's a good thing I came to this party instead of you. You were about to walk into a trap.

He tucked the keycard into the breast pocket of his coverall. Then, in a continuation of the same movement, his right arm snapped forward, and he smashed the edge of his hand against the bridge of the other man's nose. Cartilage and bone crushed inward, and a fine spray of blood misted out.

Owen caught the man as he fell and eased him silently to the floor. On his knees beside the unconscious man, he searched quickly and methodically through the other's pockets, but found nothing of interest except a second keycard, a twin to the first, equally unmarked. He pocketed it and stood up again.

He looked down for a moment at the sprawled form of the office worker. Perhaps the man would drown in the blood draining from his crushed sinuses, or perhaps not. Owen left the worker there for those who had hired him, and went about his own business.

He took the emergency stairs, not the lift, to the top floor, and paused briefly before the lockplate of the office at the end of the hall. The security system here presented no more challenge than the lock on the outside door. In a moment he was in, with the door closed and secured behind him. He'd probably taken care of any problems by silencing the man below; if he hadn't, whoever had set this trap for his sister would find more in it than they'd expected.

The desk comp had a slot for the keycard. Owen paused for a moment, considering.

Without a physical card in place to complete the circuits, not even an Adept's tricks could shunt the electron flow to perform the task he needed. But which card to use? Owen weighed them in his hand, assessing them as he had the office worker below. One of the cards, the one that he'd been given, felt limited, probably crippled on purpose. He discarded it without any more thought and switched to the card he'd taken from the office worker's pocket.

The password worked. He had Bee's datachip full within minutes; her need for information was narrow and specific, and easily supplied. Errec Ransome's chip took longer. The Master of the Guild cast his nets wide, and in strange waters, for the welfare of the galaxy's Adepts.

Errec Ransome had been a junior Adept in the Guildhouse on Ilarna when the Magewar broke out. Those days had seen slaughter done all across the galaxy, but few places had suffered worse than Ransome's home planet. Only Sapne and Entibor had experienced more destruction than Ilarna. Sapne, depopulated by plagues and reduced to barbarism, had no inhabitants left alive who could remember its ruined cities in their prime; and Entibor was an orbiting slag heap with nothing living on its surface at all.

Seeing all his friends dead and the Ilarna Guildhouse smashed into rubble, Errec Ransome had left the Adepts for a time. He had joined the privateers of Innish-Kyl in their hit-and-run war against the Magelords, fighting other men's battles for his own purposes. The Mageworlders had been crushed now for twenty years and more, and Master Ransome had long since returned to the Guild; but his vigilance never ceased.

Owen completed his second download and withdrew the keycard. And then--

Danger!

The premonition slammed into him full force. His senses clamored with the awareness of enemies nearby, and he clutched the edge of the desk with both hands.

Danger! Too close--

He lifted his head to looked around the office, and cursed under his breath at his own arrogance and stupidity.

What had seemed to be alternate exits--windows and an inner door--he saw now were only illusions, holographic projections with their reality enhanced by his own willingness to believe. The trap had closed on him in a room with no escape except by the door through which he had entered. He would have to fight his way out.

He crossed over to the door and put his hand against it, still expecting little more than blaster bravos and hired thugs, the sort of vermin who were his sister's enemies. Instead...

Worse and worse. His enemies waited for him on the other side. His enemies, and not Beka's at all.

#

Owen paused again in the deeper shadows beside a trash bin and looked around. Still no visible pursuit. Closing his eyes and drawing a deep breath, he centered himself and cleared his senses as best he could.

Nobody near. I've lost them. I hope.

He couldn't be certain; he didn't have enough energy left to make certain and still keep himself hidden. The fight at the Flatlands Investment Building had taken too much out of him--single-handed and unarmed against too many opponents, while most of his inner resources were diverted into hiding the datachips in his coverall pocket.

He'd lost the hand-to-hand fight, but he'd won the other struggle: he still had both datachips concealed when his enemies dragged him off to Florrie's Place. There was somebody at Florrie's, they gave him to understand, who was slated for the honor of finishing him off.

He'd never expected to find his sister Beka waiting for him at the other end of a blaster. Once he saw her face, he thought for a few seconds that she was going to kill him after all. But she shot the guard instead, and cut another man's throat, and then surprised Owen even further by agreeing to draw away the inevitable pursuit.

If Master Ransome's datachip ever made it back home to Galcen, Owen reflected, it would be mostly Beka's work. For his own part, he'd been half-blind from the moment he came here.

The blindness wasn't entirely his fault, he supposed. The enemy must have been clouding his vision ever since he showed up on Pleyver--the old enemy, the ones who had laid siege to the planet of Entibor for three years, and not abandoned it until Entibor was dead; who had broken every fleet the civilized worlds had sent against them except the last; who had massacred the Adepts of Ilarna and half a hundred other planets besides.

There were Mages on Pleyver, and not mere apprentices or self-taught dabblers in the ways of power. The great Magelords had returned.
What is this prologue?

It is brief. It is, I hope, interesting on its own. It serves as "Our Story So Far" for those who missed volume one. It introduces the main characters (not the distant ancestors of the main characters, or a minor character who is never heard from again).

And it is completely dispensable. You don't need to have read it to follow the book.

(Also, note the italics to indicate thoughts.)

Knowing all the theoretical reasons for not using prologues (and in general, if you can possible drop them, do so), why did I choose to use a prologue here?

Because it seemed like a good idea at the time. And, I think I was right.
 

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Drat...

For all the loyal readers of Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, here's a coupon for Witch Garden and Other Stories, a collection of some of our works in electronic form. The code is: UE28S

The code will be good for a month. Get the book for free.

It's okay to tell your friends and pass along the code.


...and double drat! I bought it two weeks ago. Darn!
 

James D. Macdonald

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Alas, everything posted from the fifth through today seems to be ... gone.

Let's see what I remember.

Plot Device.

I'm sure there was more. Did I remember to tell you that one way to increase the apparent speed of your endings was to write shorter chapters/shorter scenes there?
 

James D. Macdonald

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Recovering more stuff from Google Cache (alas, I'm way too good at doing this):

OMG!

Now, thanks to the power of the Internet and the miracle of Print On Demand publishing, you too can read the book that up 'til now only a select few slush readers at the largest publishers in America have been able to sample and enjoy!

http://www.booksonboard.com/index.ph...k&BOOK=1065970

------------------------

Neat Trick #159: As you get into your action/adventure climax, make the chapters progressively shorter and shorter. This has the effect of making the pace seem faster.

Do I do this?

You betcha.

-----------------------------

The Plot Device

-------------------------------
 

James D. Macdonald

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Y'all need a writing challenge? Here's one: Take one of these tired, unworkable plots, and make it fresh, new, and interesting:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml

(Remember Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law: There is no idea so stupid that a sufficiently talented writer can't make a readable story out of it. These ideas are stupid, you're talented, start writing!)
 

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Didn't Dennis Lehane do 4c in Shutter Island? Totally pissed me off. Half-way through I thought, this story only works if the protag is nuts, but no good writer would do that!
 

James D. Macdonald

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Heck, Jake, they pulled the same stunt in Sucker Punch, which only works if the protag is insane; and even if you assume she's insane (in a surprising twist!) it still doesn't work.

Meanwhile, I've just seen a copy of the book that reprints our "Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen," Sense of Wonder. The book also includes an essay by me on Military Science Fiction, and an essay by my long-time collaborator Doyle on Writers' Workshops.

Buy one! Better still, buy a dozen! They make excellent gifts!

(Oh, and in our never-ending quest to make our backlist available, Bad Blood.)
 

jallenecs

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Y'all need a writing challenge? Here's one: Take one of these tired, unworkable plots, and make it fresh, new, and interesting:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml

(Remember Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law: There is no idea so stupid that a sufficiently talented writer can't make a readable story out of it. These ideas are stupid, you're talented, start writing!)

The other day, my employer (a family physician) was telling me about how Number 11 on the list happened in real life. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall and his work on the bacterium responsible for stomach ulcers.

Not that it was a good idea, either for the man's health or for good storytelling. Just that it actually happened.
 

James D. Macdonald

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Someday let me tell you how parasitologists take live samples across international boundaries without being stopped by Customs.

A principal for y'all: "But it really happened that way!" isn't an excuse in fiction.

Also: That isn't necessarily a list of Bad Story ideas, it's a list of Stories They've Seen Too Often. Your challenge is to make 'em fresh and new.

(Writers have been making old, overworked stories Fresh and New for centuries if not millennia: Here's how. Take two stories. Turn one of 'em on its head. Smash 'em together. There you go! New story.)
 

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Thanks (and a sale)

Hi Jim et al;

It took weeks, but earlier this year I made it through the archives of both incarnations.

At the risk of boring old-timers here with yet another "Thanks, Mr. Mac" post, well... Thanks! Both to Jim and to all the others who have contributed here. This is a terrific resource, and so comprehensive that I find myself with nary a question left, which is why I haven't posted before. Seemed like anything I wanted to know, even if I don't remember encountering it somewhere, a search of the archives would turn it up. Often repeatedly (as when six months later, someone asks the same question... and then again a year later, someone else...).

Thanks also because I attribute my first commercial sale at least partly to what I learned here (even though the thread is about novels, and the sale was a short story - though the forms are different, writing is writing, after all).

When the call for submissions for a small press anthology called "Elf Love" came in (not a call for porn - they were asking for any stories involving elves and love, by any interpretation or definition), I wasn't all that enthused. Didn't think I had anything to say about elves and love - not really my thing. Then I thought, "Suppose this was one of those assignments Jim gives the list now and then? You'd do it, right?"

I ended up writing two, and both were accepted.

Then my latest novel rejection from one of the Big Houses came with a request to send the full manuscript of other novel that I happened to mention in the cover letter. I figure that's good sign.

So... much appreciation to Jim and everyone who participates here. You've helped me make a quantum leap forward over the last year or so.

Back to BIC.

best regards,

Duncan
 

James D. Macdonald

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Thanks also because I attribute my first commercial sale at least partly to what I learned here (even though the thread is about novels, and the sale was a short story - though the forms are different, writing is writing, after all).

That is the best news and the greatest thanks that any teacher could ask for.

But you're being much too shy: Elf Love. Buy one. Better still, buy a dozen. They make excellent gifts.


Uncle Jim, when you're writing a short story (say targeted at around 5k words) do you use as detailed an outline as when you're working on a novel? If not, do you just wing it with an idea in your head or what?

In my case, the outline is essentially the first draft. I have an idea of where I'm going with it, but it's all in my head and I write from start to finish.
 

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But you're being much too shy: Elf Love. Buy one. Better still, buy a dozen. They make excellent gifts.

Okay, thanks - I wasn't actually being shy, just had my "student writer" hat on, instead of my "marketing professional" hat.

Since you mentioned it and linked to it, I'll add that after they accepted my story, they wrote me back to say, "Hey, you're an artist, right? Can we hire you to do the cover?" Long story short, I did... so with two stories, an illustrated manga tale, and the cover, I get more royalties from each sale than most of the authors do.

Shortly after this, I sold the same small press another story, and their second anthology, Rapunzel's Daughters, just came out this month (Publisher's Weekly was kind enough to say my Norse version of "Snow White" had "an authentically ancient feel," for whatever that's worth). These books also make great gifts!
 

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I was writing en epic fantasy and it started boring me. I mean, just writing it every day was tedious because there was so much to cover essential to the story. I finally just stopped at 30,000 words and started something else. I've been working on it on and off for ten years and I have finally had enough.
 

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Good choice, twm. If it's boring you to write it, it's going to bore the readers to read it.

But you didn't stop writing, right? Hopefully you're writing something else now, something you're more excited about.
 

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Y'all need a writing challenge? Here's one: Take one of these tired, unworkable plots, and make it fresh, new, and interesting:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml

(Remember Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law: There is no idea so stupid that a sufficiently talented writer can't make a readable story out of it. These ideas are stupid, you're talented, start writing!)

35. Twee little fairies with wings fly around being twee.

I would read that. o_o They're twee!
 

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Rapunzel's Daughters: And Other Tales

"Readers who enjoy discovering new writers or fans of imaginative approaches to familiar themes should relish this small press offering." -- Library Journal

"...any fairy tale fan will find something to enjoy in this collection." -- Publishers Weekly

Not bad at all.

And a favorable mention of "Snowvhit" at Goodreads, too.
 

James D. Macdonald

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Oh, and the Unworkable Story story challenge?

When you're done, and when you've passed your story by your beta readers, and it's all polished and nice ... send it out 'til Hell won't have it.

That is the secret to being a professional writer.
 

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Good choice, twm. If it's boring you to write it, it's going to bore the readers to read it.

But you didn't stop writing, right? Hopefully you're writing something else now, something you're more excited about.

Oh yes. I'm always writing. It's my hobby. Some people paint or fish or knit, I write.