Minion of the Moon

Deadline time

2008-09-01T15:56:00.003-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story: 90

Only a few more hours to get your teeny tiny stories submitted. When September 1 ends on the East Coast, so does your chance to enter the 2008 Short-Short Story contest, so no more procrastinating!

Weapon of Choice

2008-06-19T21:27:00.004-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story: 30

I have an abnormal fondness for pens. I'm not sure exactly when this passion was born, but by the time I was in high school, my tastes had become so specialized that I was almost exclusively using fountain pens (no wonder I disliked math class--the one place I couldn't get inky). My best friend shared my obsession, and we traded different colored ink cartridges back and forth the way some teenaged girls swap lipsticks.

My friend and I were a minority of two in this regard. I'll admit to getting a twisted thrill out of brandishing my blackened hands at cheerleaders, pretending I was going to rub ink on them. It never failed to draw a most comical look of utter terror.

Little did I know that, across the state, my future husband was toiling away with ink-stained fingertips, changing out empty cartridges at inopportune moments, washing dried-out and clogged nubs, making a joyful mess with a fistful of his own Schaeffers.

Sadly, Brian's and my combined efforts apparently weren't enough to keep the mass production of fountain pens a lucrative venture. The only fountain pens at Office Depot these days are the boxed-gift variety, costing $25 and up, with special, impossible-to-find refills. And they don't even work as well as the three buck Schaeffers did.

You can imagine my excitement when I discovered the Varsity disposable fountain pen. Yes, the disposability pretty much negates the purpose of a fountain pen, but I'll admit I'm hooked. It has that good old fountain pen feel. The ink looks rich on the page, and the angled nub makes the worst chicken scratch look more elegant. Because they're disposable, they're mess-free too, which I appreciate now that I'm an adult and need to at least try to blend into the mainstream.

So please, do me a favor and order some to keep them from going extinct. They have black, blue, purple, and even turquoise ink. I see that Foray now has an even cheaper disposable fountain pen, (which hopefully means Pilot's pen has been a smashing success) but I haven't tried these yet and can't vouch for them.

Results have been posted!

2008-06-09T10:06:00.005-05:00

Total number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel: 198

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story: 23

We emailed our mysterious winners and have heard back from all three. Their bios--impressive as always--and have now been posted. The Best First Chapter contest always leaves us feeling a bit unsettled. We want to read chapters two and three and four and so on till we reach THE END. Hopefully these talented writers' novels will be available at a bookstore near you soon, and we'll all be able to keep turning the pages and find out what happens next.

Congratulations to our winners! We'll be putting the money orders in the mail today (apologies to our two international writers for the current weak state of the dollar). Thanks to everyone who took the time to find us and to submit your work. As you can see, your chances for the short-short story contest are quite good at the moment, so if you have a short piece of fiction, send it our way.

Deadline looming

2008-02-19T10:52:00.002-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 140

If anyone’s still checking in, I apologize for the prolonged absence. Life has just been a little too interesting the last couple of months.

Contest entries started pouring in last week, and my first thought was that the new online Writers’ Market listing must’ve gone up. It finally occurred to me that it’s end-of-the wire time, which is always extra busy. I can’t believe we’ve almost reached another deadline. Leap year gives you an extra day, so be sure to get your first chapter in before March 1.

Contest prize change

2007-12-12T09:05:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 42

I went to the post office during my lunch hour yesterday to buy money orders, but when I saw the line stretching outside the door, I did a 180. All those people with Christmas packages reminded me I have three I need to get in the mail myself, so I figured if I have to stand in line, it makes more sense to just do it all at once. Course that means I have to actually get the gifts I've bought boxed up. I don't know why that small step seems to take so long.

But I promise, contest winners, the prizes will go out in the mail this week.

Which reminds me of some fun news--one of Brian's goals is to increase the prize amounts, and he decided at the last minute to take a small step in that direction now. Effective immediately, third place will get $25 in addition to an autographed novel.

It'll probably be a year or two till we bump up all the prize amounts, but that is part of the grand scheme. Don't worry though--the contests will always be free to enter.

Post-contest letdown

2007-12-10T08:45:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 37

Usually prize-awarding time puts me in a good mood, but after these recent comments, I'm feeling guilty. We certainly never meant to discourage or sadden anyone with these contests.

If you entered but didn't win, take heart. Think of all the people who say they want to write but never do. You overcame that hurdle. Then you showed courage in sending out your work. I know that isn't easy.

My dad, a seasoned freelance illustrator, came to talk to my freshmen about the creative process a couple weeks ago, and he reminded them (and me) this: every artist out there with an impressive list of achievements has a much longer (usually secret) list of rejections and disappointments. There will be stretches of time when you aren't rewarded for your efforts, so you have to be patient and persistent.

I'm not trying to discourage you further; I'm just trying to say that everyone who sets out to be any kind of artist has obstacles constantly springing up in front of them. Most eventually give up, but some keep stubbornly finding ways over and around those obstacles.

There's so much of this business you can't control--whether it's winning a contest, getting a work accepted for publication, or landing a grant. The only thing you can truly control is yourself and your work. If you refuse to give up, if you commit yourself to honing your craft and doing your best work, if you continue to send out your work, then you are a writer, and no one can tell you otherwise. The external validations are bound to follow.

Quick contest update

2007-12-03T14:01:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 35

Time flies fast during the holidays. Then too, we've been having some computer problems which have put me more in a pen-and-paper mode of experiencing time. From an electronic perspective, I haven't posted in ages, though it really doesn't feel that long to me.

Contest judging for the short-short story contest has been completed! I know we're running late with the official announcement, but we haven't heard back from all three winners yet. So remember to check all your email accounts if you entered. Hopefully the news will get posted soon.

The tortoise and the hare

2007-11-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 23

An observant contestant pointed out that the Best First Chapter guideline page still listed March 1, 2007 as the deadline. I apologize for failing to catch that when I updated Brian’s site. I am going to use aging as my excuse. Every year, I get a little more absent-minded, and then too, I can’t seem to wrap my brain around the fact that it is 2007, which must have prevented me from realizing that next March will actually be 2008. Where do all the years go?

Back to the writing exercise from earlier this week…besides noticing that you wrote more when you were just observing (and not evaluating as you went along), you might have found that the quality of writing from the second part of the exercise was better.

Therein lies the conundrum of first draft writing. Do you spill it all out fast, NaNoWriMo-style, to prevent paralysis, or do you go at a slow and steady pace, editing yourself as you go along?

Different writers use different strategies when it comes to a first draft. Some prefer a more polished draft and can’t stomach the thought of writing dozens (or even hundreds) of pages that might end up on the cutting room floor, while others don’t mind ruthlessly slashing and burning a messy first draft during revisions.

Play around with both the tortoise and the hare approach. If you’re perpetually frozen with fear of failure (or any other writers' block-creating thoughts), try the speedy, free-writing method. Charge straight ahead without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a problem accumulating pages but have more trouble structuring your writing into a cohesive whole, you might want to invest more time on plotting notes beforehand and on revising as you go along. It will take you longer to reach the end of your first draft, but odds are that when you do, it won’t be quite as much of a baggy monster.

November is NaNoWriMo

2007-11-06T08:56:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 22

There are quite possibly more people writing novels during the month of November than any other time of year, thanks to the popularity of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

In order to ‘win’ NaNoWriMo, participants write a complete novel—defined as 50,000 words—during the month. Here’s a quote from the website: “Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

That kind of free-writing mentality can be useful for cranking out a first draft. Some writers can’t turn off the editors' voices in their heads and end up with writers' block, terrified of making a misstep.

Here’s a writing exercise that quickly illustrates how this approach works. (I didn’t make it up, but alas, I can’t remember where it came from.) Go to a good people-watching spot. First, watch one couple or one small group of people interact. Jot down every single gesture you observe. Do this for 10 minutes.

Next, choose another set of people to watch, but this time, write down only the gestures that you find intriguing. Take 10 minutes again.

You’ll probably find that you wrote a lot more during the first ten minutes than the second. That’s because your inner editor was temporarily silenced. Once you started judging whether your subject matter was good enough to warrant writing about, that slowed you down and decreased your output. More thoughts on this next time...

And hey, if you’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year, remember you have till March 1 to polish up your first chapter and submit it to the InnermoonLit contest.

Happy Halloweiner

2007-11-01T09:06:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 21

Hope you had a wonderful Halloween!

Brodsky's thinking, There are so many little trick-or-treaters out there. Can't I eat just one???

The reading period continues

2007-10-29T08:06:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 21

We're knee-deep in Halloween preparations, but we're also slowly making our way through short-short story entries. I like going slowly and not reading more than a few entries a day so that we can give each one extra time and focus. I guess if we ever get deluged, we'll have to speed up our reading, but for now it's nice to take a leisurely pace.

November is just around the corner, though, so final decision time is not that far off. Be sure to keep an eye on your email for the full contest results.

A note about Ellen

2007-10-22T08:38:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 20

Last Tuesday, Brian and I happened to catch the infamous Ellen episode as it first unfurled. I’m still amazed at this story’s legs and wish there were some way to analyze this viral sensation and harness that power to bring this much public attention to more important issues (or, you know, to Brian’s novels :) ).

The vital ingredients seem to be: a celebrity’s on-air breakdown (which felt very staged, but I can’t decide whether the tinge of falseness contributed to the trainwreck factor or not), a cute puppy, sad children, and two warring factions, both with a sense of righteous anger. It was like the perfect storm of celebrity gossip. Or maybe people are just that bored with the usual celebrity gossip cycle of public intoxication, rehab, couplings, and break-ups.

Anyway, I have to say that Brian and I seem to be in the minority of people who weren’t manipulated into taking Ellen’s side here. The rescue organization’s rules may seem stringent, but these groups create their rules in response to real instances of human neglect and abuse, not because they want to keep dogs away from good homes. Believe it or not, there are malicious and dishonest adopters out there who intend to harm animals, in addition to the more common problem of people with good intentions who, for whatever reason, decide they aren’t willing to commit to an animal and end up abandoning their pets.

The two rescue groups that saved our dogs Kasay and Brodsky had different levels of safeguards and guidelines in place, but they took lots of time to make sure we understood them, as I’m sure Mutts & Moms did with Ellen and Portia. Clearly, these volunteers are motivated by genuine concern for the animals’ well-being, and I think they deserve our admiration. They devote a great deal of time, energy and often their own personal funds to make sure the dogs they rescue stay out of the foster home/dog pound cycle for good.

As Brian used to say when he was teaching, the sad thing about rules is that once you make them, you have to abide by them. There will always be someone who wants to break the rules and face no consequences, but once you make allowances for one person, you have to make allowances for everyone. The issue that seems beyond argument to me is that Ellen knew the rules and chose to enter into a contract with this particular organization. Since this was her second attempt at adopting a dog from this group (she returned a previous dog, also due to cat relation issues), the group was obviously reasonable and willing to give her a second chance.

We admire anyone who volunteers with this type of group and hope this debacle hasn’t sullied the collective reputation of rescue groups.

Responding to critique: the emotional part con't.

2007-10-17T07:45:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

OK, I hope you weren’t waiting with bated breath or anything, because I don’t really have any gimmicky trick that will help you accept criticism gracefully other than this piece of common sense advice: let some time pass.

Time is the best way to silence the defensive voice in your head. If you’re getting oral feedback from your reader, don’t interrupt. Let your reader talk, and take copious notes. Set the notes aside for awhile till the negative comments lose their sting and you can really digest them.

Time is the key to being able to evaluate your writing objectively. More experienced writers tend to have more callouses built up than beginners. That’s part of what I mean. But each new piece of writing needs a little time to breathe too. When the ink on the page is still wet and you’re feeling euphoric about what you’ve just written down, that’s not the time to call in your reader for a critique. Wait a day or a week or a month—however long it takes for you to achieve that slightly detached, cold-light-of-dawn perspective.

Time also gives you a chance to do some solo revising. Rough drafts are meant to be rough. You aren’t worried about perfection; you just want to get the words flowing. And that’s the way it should be. Your work has its own life cycle, and before you show your newborn to even one other person, you might want to clean it up a little and throw a diaper on it.

In her book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp talks about failure as an integral part of any creative endeavor. She distinguishes between private and public failures, saying the more you fail in private, the less likely you’ll be to fail in public (which of course is much more painful and embarrassing). The more you edit your work alone, the fewer mistakes your reader will find. In turn, the more help you can get from a reader before sending your work to an even greater public, the greater your chances for success.

Responding to a critique: the emotional part

2007-10-15T08:44:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

When someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, it’s natural to respond with defensiveness. If you get some less-than-glowing feedback as part of a critique (and believe me, I know how much even the mildest criticism can sting), you may be tempted to either argue back or take the passive approach—pretend to agree, then proceed to ignore and dismiss the suggestions.

That response isn’t helpful to anyone, and it’s an urge all writers must fight. Not only is your piece of writing not going to improve in a vacuum, but if you blow up at your reader, you could end up with hurt feelings on both sides and a permanently damaged relationship.

You should trust your reader’s judgment and taste and be certain that he wants to help you improve and is not just saying mean things for the fun of it, and if you don't...well, you need to find a different reader. On the other hand, if you did trust his skill, integrity, and motivation to start with, you have to believe that whatever criticisms he’s offering are given for the sake of improving your writing, not to make you feel bad.

Next time I'll have some advice on how to combat this defensive reflex so that you can get as much good as possible out of a critique.

Putting theory into practice

2007-10-10T08:03:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

Let’s say you have a skilled and trusted reader or two to help you edit your work. Now comes the hard part: taking their advice. It’s hard to edit someone else’s writing—to figure out where its weaknesses lie and suggest fixes. But when you are the writer getting critiqued, implementing that advice is even more difficult, on both emotional and intellectual levels.

Brian and I are currently in the middle of an editing project for a writer who is refreshingly open to suggestions and quite adept at revising, which I guess is what brought this issue to mind. If you’ve ever taught English or writing or participated in any kind of workshop or critique group, you know how rare it is to find writers, like the one we’re fortunate to be working with now, who are able to use constructive criticism to really improve their work.

Let’s talk about the simple, intellectual side of this issue first and leave the sticky emotional part till later. There’s no doubt about it: big-picture fixes are hard to implement. Completely changing a character’s motivation or reordering a series of events in your story or correcting a logistical error with a plotline are all far easier said than done. Your ‘fix’ may end up being less effective than the original version or may cause unforeseen problems with the story later on, making your whole house of cards collapse.

Brian has a good trick to circumvent that problem: whenever he’s planning a big revision, he also keeps the older version of the file intact in case he decides to reverse the changes later on. Thanks to the computer, this is pretty easy to do. Now I don’t suggest making a different version of your file every single time you revise, only when you’re undertaking major surgery. Keeping more than two or three versions of a file can get too confusing.

Once your big-picture problems are out of the way, though, even the small-scale fixes can be tricky to make. Just entering line edits can be tedious and creates opportunities for even more typos to sneak their way into your work.

Revising your work will probably take even more time and energy than writing the first draft did, so be prepared to give it all the care and patience it needs during the polishing phase.

The forest and the trees

2007-10-08T08:02:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

Last week, I said writers might find it helpful to have separate readers for higher-order and lower-order concerns. Brian and I have worked a handful of times on editing jobs for other writers, and that’s exactly how we operate.

Brian is excellent at the higher-order stuff: honing in on issues of pacing, structure, dialogue, characterization, and so forth. He’s also great at suggesting ways to fix big-picture level problems. I can often sense when something’s amiss on this level but am not good at knowing exactly how to fix it.

On the other hand, I have become a pretty good line editor over the years. I try to pay attention to tiny details, like noticing if a character’s eyes are brown on page 10 and blue on page 200, or keeping up with how much story time elapses between plot points, what season it’s supposed to be, and so on. Comma and spelling errors tend to jump out at me now as if lighted by neon.

With me holding my magnifying lens up to the tree bark, Brian is free to concentrate on the forest--although truth be told, he also picks up a lot of grammar errors. We tend to edit on our own, then consolidate all the marks onto one copy, and I always feel validated when we both mark the same errors.

Of course, when it comes to higher- and lower-order concerns, sequence is important. You really don’t need to be worrying too much about minutiae until your later revisions. There’s no point agonizing over every punctuation mark when entire chapters may need to be cut or completely rewritten in order to fix a higher-order concern. Always revise with an eye toward the big picture first.

Brodsky the Wonder Dog

2007-10-05T09:32:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 17

When you have multiple dogs, one thing you quickly learn about is sibling rivalry. When Brodsky gives us a disdainful look if he thinks Kasay’s gotten a bigger treat (and vice versa), it takes me back to the days when my sister and brother and I used to count our jellybeans to make sure nobody had been slighted by the Easter bunny.

My mother wasted an unknown portion of her life counting out jellybeans (or whatever the treat du jour happened to be) and dividing by three. Now it’s our turn, except with easier math. I felt guilty about devoting an entry solely to Kasay last week. I don’t think Brodsky has a secret laptop with internet access and lurks here, but just in case…today is his turn in the spotlight.

We knew about Kasay’s health problems when we took him in, but Brodsky was supposed to be the healthy one. He was the easy one: more mature, less whiny when left alone, less destructive, fewer housebreaking accidents. Sure, his ribs were sticking out, his coat was very coarse, and he seemed extremely subdued, but we figured he’d soon gain weight and chalked the rest up to his nature.

We found Brodsky online from a different rescue organization, one that isn’t nearly as well-organized and fastidious as Crossroads, and a few days after he arrived, I noticed that he had intestinal worms. I was a bit perturbed at his rescue group for not giving us his vet records immediately and for neglecting to tell us about his condition. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, because when I took him to the vet for treatment, they discovered he also had heartworms, which of course can be life-threatening.

The vet began immediate treatment of the intestinal worms and scheduled a two-day stay for Brodsky to receive his heartworm treatment: two shots of a form of arsenic. The treatment itself is dangerous, but the vet felt he was in the early stages and could receive both shots at once. Apparently, in more advanced cases, the shots have to spread out over several months.

Of course we were worried about our poor guy, and in the meantime, his old vet records finally did arrive in the mail (which showed that he’d tested negative for heartworms two months prior—I later learned it’s not unusual for it to go undetected in the very early stages), along with medicine for the intestinal worms. We ending up being so thankful that Brodsky’s foster parents hadn’t brought this along when they dropped him off; otherwise, we wouldn’t have had a reason to take him into the vet right away, and we might not have discovered the heartworms until it was too late.

Brodsky responded well to his hospitalization, and within a month had put on weight, developed a much smoother and shinier coat, and shown more energy and exuberance than we’d thought he was capable of. At his six-month follow-up, he was declared heartworm-free. Here he is in all his wondrous splendor.

Before (on the left): super-skinny and not about to leap around like some other dogs we know.

Now: Smooth, shiny, chubby, chock full of vim and vigor:

Finding a first reader

2007-10-03T09:27:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

No matter how much of a grammar perfectionist you may be, every writer still needs some editorial feedback and assistance. It’s impossible to be completely objective about your own writing. Not to sound like Captain Obvious here, but you can’t know how readable your work is without asking the opinion of someone who doesn’t live in your own head.

Your first reader can be a friend, spouse, family member, colleague, workshop classmate, writers’ group, online buddy, or even a relative stranger. A good reader is very hard to find, so explore all those avenues if you’re in need of one.

Your reader should be fairly well-read in your genre so that they have a general sense of what works and what doesn’t. You don’t want a yes-man who is either blind to your flaws or afraid to point them out. Nor do you want someone overly negative who might run roughshod over your sensitive artist side and permanently deflate your dreams.

It might be that you need several readers to balance each other out; for instance, one who’s great at seeing big picture issues with story and character and another who has a microscopic eye for line editing. Just beware of getting input from too many different readers, or you could run into that whole irritating pleasing-no-one-because-you've-tried-to-please-everyone phenomenon.

Style sheets

2007-10-01T10:10:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

If the English language were our mother, she would be the cool, laid-back kind, the kind that inspires longing and envy in children with strict parents. There are some haphazardly put-together rules, but if you really want to, you can break a lot of them and still not be “wrong” or get into any real trouble. Sewwww-weet, huh?

But that wishy-washy, namby-pamby type of parenting comes with its own set of frustrations. I'm sure you've heard Dr. Phil and his ilk say that children crave discipline and order. I don't know whether I agree with that, but I know how frustrating it is to try to teach grammar. Just when it looks like a lightbulb has gone off and your students understand the rule you're explaining, you have to do a 180 and include the many exceptions to that rule.

Black-and-white, hard-and-fast rules can be comforting. But no, our mom is a freedom-loving hippie who doesn’t believe in such things and is full of waffling exceptions: “‘i’ after ‘e,’ I say! Well, OK…except after ‘c’…or in long ‘a’ sounds like 'weigh' and 'neighbor'…” “A comma must always come before the coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence! Unless it’s a very short clause and there’s no risk of confusion, in which case, you can leave it out if you want to…” “Sentences shouldn’t be started with a conjunction or ended with a preposition…unless enough people start doing it...or it is appropriate for your purpose and audience...then it’s OK.”

It’s enough to make you long for a stricter language.

As a writer, you have the freedom to decide so many things: alternate spellings, whether you use or omit the last comma in items in a series, phonetic spellings, etc. It seems more professional, though, to have some consistency within a manuscript so that your choices seem deliberate, not random. I don’t mind ‘canceled’ or ‘cancelled,’ but somehow it bothers me when I see an author switch back and forth in the same piece of writing.

That’s where a style sheet comes in. I first learned about this wonderful tool when I was working on the Stripmall project. A style sheet is simply your own personalized usage manual/dictionary that can help you be consistent when faced with alternate spelling and usage situations. Phonetic spellings, slang terms, and proper names (particularly those you make up) can’t be looked up in the Prentice Hall Handbook, so make yourself a running list that you can refer back to when it’s line editing time.

It’s a great idea to make a semi-permanent style sheet for yourself with your general preferences listed, but you also need a customized sheet for each book or story that includes any unusually spelled or fictitious proper nouns. Usually a style sheet for a novel ends up being just a page or two, which is ideal for quick reference.

Kasay the Wonder Dog

2007-09-28T09:19:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

You may have noticed Kasay’s Harry Potterish scar in the last dog entry and might be a tad curious about its origins. That means it’s flashback time.

When Kasay was pulled off death row by the wonderful folks at Crossroads Animal Rescue, he had what appeared to be some small wounds on his back. His loving foster mom, Julie, took him to the vet for treatment. As the techs shaved Kasay’s fur to treat the wounds, they discovered extensive infection. More and more of the skin fell away, and before long, the majority of his back was one big open wound. The diagnosis wasn’t conclusive, and we’re still not sure if it was a chemical or sun burn, spider bite, or infected bite from another dog. Julie and her family spent two months tirelessly nursing Kasay back to health.

Here he is all shaved and bandaged and coned up.

When we adopted Kasay, the wound was about 90% closed up. He had to sleep wearing his cone for a short time and was always cooperative about letting us disinfect and care for the wound.

Most of his fur grew back, but he still has this distinctive battle scar to remind us that he is a courageous warrior with amazing powers of regeneration.

My grammar bio refuses to die

2007-09-26T08:08:00.001-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15 - We're stuck again! I hope this isn't a technical problem but just a natural lull in submissions.

It was many years before I found myself standing in front of a class again, teaching Freshman Composition. Fortunately for me, Brian has taught various college-level writing classes and helped me tremendously, sharing all his lectures and giving me tons of advice, support, and both figurative and literal hand-holding. This experience forced me to finally take the time to learn the proper usage of commas. Brian shared his NAYFOBS mnemonic with me (the same idea as FANBOYS, but so much better. The sillier the mnemonic device, the easier it is to remember), and I was able to mark student papers and teach them the rules.

Finally getting back to the second part of that advice I mentioned last week...Am I saying that every writer should teach? No, although there’s no better motivation for learning something than teaching it to someone else. What I’m saying is that I think reading will only take you so far. You will pick up a lot of good practices, and reading hones your ear for language, but you will still have your grammar weak spots. (Mine were pretty common: comma splices and faulty parallelism. And I have a tendency to spell led l-e-a-d.)

Try to identify your weaknesses, then commit to fixing those bad habits. You could take a class or get some one-on-one tutoring, or you could buy an up-to-date writer’s handbook and teach yourself to correct your work.

I like the Prentice Hall Handbook. It’s well organized and the grammar lessons are easy to understand. You can get a used copy at Amazon for under a dollar (plus shipping, of course). If you live near a college or university, you might even be able to snag a free one. Our English department routinely puts dozens of instructor’s editions of textbooks out in the hall on their “free books” shelf. Professors get so many free copies from publishers hoping they’ll adopt their books, purging is an ongoing process. As long as you have a trusty reference manual of your own, you don’t have to memorize the rules but can refer back to it as often as needed.

My grammar bio cont.

2007-09-24T08:08:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

When Brian asked me to work as a typist and copy editor with him and three of his MFA classmates on their collaborative novel Stripmall Bohemia, I was nervous. In addition to the Yoko vibe I felt as the sole girlfriend butting into the four guys’ project, I was not at all confident about my abilities. Not only was my grammar knowledge limited, but I was a self-taught typist as well.

But I muddled through and, all in all, I think I helped the boys out. During that project, my typing and editing skills did improve, but the truth is, Brian is such a stringent reviser and self-editor, proofing his work didn’t force me to address all of my grammar deficiencies. I continued to make mistakes in my writing that he was far beyond making in his.

Teaching is what made me face the grammar dragon head on.

My first teaching experience was a high school course called Teacher Cadets, a sort of pre-education course for seniors to help us decide whether this was a career we wanted to pursue. In the spring, we traveled to another school for an hour a day to do observations, culminating in our teaching one lesson.

I was assigned to a sixth-grade language arts class which, much to my chagrin at the time, consisted entirely of grammar instruction. Reading had been separated into a different class period--one that didn’t align with my class schedule. The lesson I ended up having to teach was ‘who and whom.’ I was so nervous that I overlearned the lesson and, to this day, that is one grammar rule I’ve got down pat. On the other hand, I couldn’t tell you one thing the teacher taught during the 20 or so classes I observed.

This is getting long-winded, so I’m going to split it up to keep your eyes from crossing.

My grammar biography

2007-09-21T08:42:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

For the sake of providing some background and context to this issue, I have a nerdy confession: I’m a little disappointed that I’ve never been asked to diagram a sentence. My grandfather used to work as the art director for a publisher and sometimes sent us language arts textbooks. I remember as a 3rd grader reading the chapters on diagramming with true awe: a mixture of fascination and horror. This was mysterious, complex, big-kid stuff, like algebra or chemistry.

I believed that one day I’d know all the fancy words for parts of speech and learn how and where to draw those lines and symbols, dissecting sentences with a full understanding of exactly what made them tick. Somehow, things didn’t work out that way.

The Chomskian idea of innate linguistic knowledge I referred to in my last entry has been so much in vogue the last few decades that formal grammar instruction has virtually been done away with. [We don’t need to teach grammar—the kids pick it up naturally from reading!] My last grammar lesson was in 7th grade—from then on, English classes consisted solely of reading and analyzing fiction, poetry, and drama. We had to write essays and papers, but we were pretty much on our own as far as figuring out language mechanics. I’m sure I made the same small errors over and over, but I never had the kind of teacher who took points off for minor errors, so I was never motivated to correct myself.

In college, there was a grammar/history of the language course offered, but I’d heard rumors of how difficult it was from the secondary education-track English majors who were required to take it. I studied my catalog and discovered that, since I wasn’t seeking teacher certification, I could substitute a literature class on 20th century American poetry for the grammar course. I told all my fellow English majors about this loophole and single-handedly caused a spike in registration for that poetry class, which consisted of meeting at our professor’s house one night a week to eat soup and gossip about the lives of well-known poets. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the poetry course, but it wasn’t long before I was regretting my cowardly registration choice.

There I was in the mid-1990s, an English degree in hand but no real grammar know-how beyond the ‘this sounds correct’ basics I’d intuitively picked up along the way. I was occasionally asked to proofread something for a job and felt like a fraud but muddled my way through, marking egregious errors and ignoring whatever I wasn’t sure about. Then one day, my boyfriend (yep, he’s the one) enlisted my help with editing his novel, and suddenly the stakes were higher than they’d ever been.

What to do if you need help with grammar: Part 1

2007-09-19T09:02:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

The good news is that many contemporary linguists agree that we learn grammar through usage, not instruction. My prescription for you, if you have problems in this area, is twofold.

First, read. Read a wide array of books, including those biggies you pretended to read in high school but never did. Reread your favorites. You will begin to subconsciously develop an ear for proper usage.

I caution you to make your reading broad so that you don’t inadvertently start to mimic any one writer’s voice. That sort of mimicry is not necessarily a bad thing and, in fact, is probably inevitable for writers just starting out. But if you’ve been at this enterprise for a decade or more, it’s time to develop your own unique voice and avoid the derivative.

I’ll hold off on the bad news for the time being, except to say that I’ve come to believe you can’t become completely proficient with language just by reading. Some instruction is in order.

Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 2

2007-09-17T07:47:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 14

The dogs are on a bit of a different learning curve, so each will have to give his final lesson separately.

Lesson #4 from Kasay: Ice eating is a delicious way to stay hydrated.

Lesson #4A: But be sure to save some of your ice for later. It will make a lovely midnight snack.

Lesson #4B: Doh! Where’d my ice go?! Oooohhh yeah…I mean, DON'T try to save it for later. I don’t know why I can’t keep that one straight. Must develop a mnemonic device…Chew it fast, for it won’t last? ICE = It Can Expire? Eat it when it’s dealt or it will melt?

Lesson #5 from Brodsky (see above three pics): Hamming for the camera is a sign of immaturity. Keep your face turned away from the paparazzi at all times.

Oh no! They caught me! How embarrassing. [Or maybe he is humiliated by his owner's socks-with-sandals fashion faux pas. Hey, I was just trying to keep the skeeters off my ankles.]

Lesson #5A: Best to have a good sense of humor when cornered. Punching out the paparazzi only leads to trouble, or so my parole officer tells me.

DD: Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 1

2007-09-14T07:45:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 10

We got the tiniest sheen of drizzle last night—the first time it’s rained in weeks—and it knocked the edge off the heat. Today it’s not supposed to reach the 80s, and it hasn’t been that pleasant in months. So this is a good time to look at the summer of '07 in the rearview and see what lessons it held. For the dachshunds, of course. I am beyond learning much about summer except it seems to be getting longer and hotter.

Here we go. You might want to take some notes on this.

Lesson #1: Weeds grow even in a drought. Help your owner with the pruning chores.

Lesson #2: Eat plenty of green leafy vegetables for hydration and antioxidants.

Lesson #3: In the summer, it's best to stay on top of the blanket.

The grammar wars con't.

2007-09-12T07:44:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 7

So which side do we represent in this war? Are we judging entries with the eagle eyes of the rules keepers or the freewheeling nonchalance of the grammar bohemians?

Brian and I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between those two extremes but admittedly closer to the former camp than the latter. If the grammar and mechanics errors in a piece are rampant, we do lower the presentation score. Someone who wants to be a writer but has no understanding of the fundamentals is conveying laziness and a lack of respect for the medium.

It’s like a painter who doesn’t know how to mix colors. You can’t cut corners and skip ahead from basic skills to advanced execution. You have to put in the effort and learn how to use your artistic tools, and your tools are words. Expecting someone else to fix it all for you later is not only arrogant but naïve. No one else is going to care about your work as much as you do.

Improper use of language is a burden on your reader. You know what you’re trying to say, but if you completely ignore the rules of language, your reader will likely become frustrated and have to read each sentence multiple times, mentally inserting the proper punctuation and filling in the gaps in order to make sense of your work. If that is the case, you have failed in your attempt to express yourself. And don’t tell me you had to reread Shakespeare or Faulkner’s sentences in order to understand them. There is a difference between writing that is difficult to read because it is complex and writing that is incomprehensible because it follows no known conventions of language.

Now that I’ve ticked off the grammar bohos, let me add that we understand that grammar is ever-changing, and we don’t cling stubbornly to outdated rules or feel the need to enforce rules just for the principle of the matter. Too, we know that formatting and punctuation errors beyond the author’s control sometimes happen in cyberspace, so we are not taking five points off for every misused comma or anything like that. We don’t penalize for minor errors that don’t interfere with readability (or, of course, that seem intentional and effectively serve a function in the entry). Grammar mistakes tend to fade into the background and be forgotten in the presence of a well-crafted, original plot, fascinating characters, and sparkling dialogue, and those higher-order concerns are what jump out at us most of all.

But when we read an entry that excels in those other categories but also doesn’t have any glaring errors, it shows us that the piece has been carefully edited, that the writer is probably well read and knowledgeable about his craft, and that he has put as much time and passion into the revision as he put into the writing, and we find that impressive. Those are the entries that get an immediate ticket to the ‘yes’ stack.

The grammar wars

2007-09-10T08:15:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 5

Grammar: such an oddly touchy subject among writers. There are two warring camps on this subject.

There are the rules keepers—those writers who feel they know the rules and become agitated at others’ errors. Some extremists are frozen in time, insisting people adhere to outdated rules. These old-school purists do not approve of splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, despite what the latest edition of the Holt Handbook permits. They take care to avoid any such manual published within the last few decades, so they neither know which former grammar no-no’s have become acceptable, nor do they want to know.

Ironically, rules keepers are plagued with a curse. Anyone who writes about grammar or rails against some usage pet peeve in print will have, embedded in her diatribe, at least one grammatical error. I remember when Brian first pointed out this phenomenon to me years ago, and I have yet to see it disproven. It is some kind of inevitability, perhaps a joke the universe plays on us to remind us that perfection is unattainable.

The copyeditors (professional rules keepers, no less) of a nearby major metropolitan newspaper have a contest each year to see who can locate the first typo or grammatical error in the latest edition of the AP Stylebook (you know, journalists’ grammar bible). It never takes them more than 30 minutes to find one. C’mon, I bet you can locate one in this very blog entry, though I promise I haven’t intentionally put any in.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the grammar bohemians who play free and loose with language. They don’t worry about grammar, either believing it’s a waste of time and something for lowly proofreaders and editors--not true artistes--to fret over, or thinking their intentional disregard of grammatical conventions is essential to their unique writing style and conveys some deeper meaning. They see themselves as iconoclastic rebels, and they view the rules keepers as dull pedants.

The winning ingredients: presentation

2007-09-05T07:33:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 3

Now here’s a mysterious category from the scorecard. Are we judging entries based on the quality of the paper they’re printed on or the fanciness of the packaging in which they arrive? No—it’s all online, remember.

So are we referring to submissions that come in with the formatting intact versus those that somehow get garbled in transmission and end up with triangles and accent marks where all the normal punctuation marks should be? No, we don’t hold mysterious formatting glitches against you.

‘Presentation’ simply means the entry’s language—its diction, syntax, tone. Entries that are well written receive high marks in this category. Keep in mind that ‘well written’ can mean rich and poetic writing or it can mean sparse, invisible writing, depending on what seems appropriate for a particular piece of fiction. As always, there are no black-and-white, one-size-fits-all rules where fiction is concerned.

Also falling under this category are

grammar and mechanics.

//cue the blood-curdling screams and horror movie music//

But we’ll talk more about that later.

Ding dong!

2007-09-03T08:28:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 1

This wicked summer is now officially dead (good riddance to triple-digit temperatures), and that means it’s changeover time for the writing contests. Final tally on entries for the Best Short-Short Story Contest: 197. We just barely beat last year’s number, but at least we did exceed it!

Here they are--our reading materials for the next few weeks:

Oh, and I apologize if I sounded harsh about early Best First Chapter entries last week. I didn’t mean you or your entry were disqualified forever and ever as part of some weird grudge against earlybirds, I just mean if you submitted before September 1, you need to resubmit during the submission period in order to qualify (9/1/07-3/1/08).

A note about anonymity

2007-08-31T08:02:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 165

As is the practice with most writing contests, we judge entries anonymously. Since ours is a fee-free online contest, we have the luxury of requiring that very little identifying information be attached to each entry.

But what if that one piece of information—your email address—compromises your anonymity? If your real name is embedded in your email address, should you open up a new Hotmail account and go incognito?

Of course you can, but you really needn’t bother. That is, unless you’re someone we know—a friend, relative, or former student, say. That’s the point of anonymity, to keep us from being biased in case anyone we know should ever enter.

Rest assured, if your name appears in your email address, we don’t Google you, or keep track of whether you’ve emailed us a question, or keep up with whether you’ve entered before, or really pay much attention to the address at all.

Like I’ve said before, I record the addresses when the entries come in, but when our reading period begins, we honestly don’t pay attention to the address on the entry. So don’t worry about going to a lot of trouble to establish a secret identity. At least not for our sakes.

Deadline is approaching

2007-08-29T12:24:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 141

Consider this your friendly reminder that the deadline for this year's short-short story contest is Saturday night at 11:59 p.m., EST.

I was hoping we'd get more entries than last year (194) but at this point it doesn't look like that's going to happen. There's usually a last-minute rush, though, so who knows. C'mon and get those puppies sent in! Anybody out there have 50 pieces of flash fiction lying around? ;) Or one will do.

This also means if you're chomping at the bit to enter the InnermoonLit Contest for Best First Chapter of a Novel contest, you will soon be able to do so. And yes, if you've snuck in your first chapter early, it has been disqualified. We begin accepting entries for that contest on September 1.

Plot versus story

2007-08-27T08:39:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 132

In Technique in Fiction, Macauley and Lanning make what I think is a helpful distinction between story and plot. (Others have made this distinction too--I just thought I’d cite this book because it gives a pretty comprehensive overview on the subject.)

A story is a sequence of events prompted by the question, “And then what happened?” whereas a plot contains events causally linked to each other, prompting the question, “Why?”

Story, of course, is the primitive granddaddy of the two. The slice-of-life fiction I referred to last week would fall under the story category. Plot is an artifice and a much more recent invention. It’s a story structured into a basic pyramid shape, consisting of establishment of characters and situation, rising action, climax, and falling action (the names of these elements vary, but this is the simplest example). Real life doesn’t have a single plot in which events build upon each other neatly, causing other events, which bring about a dramatic moment of change or crisis, after which everyone dies or lives happily ever after, depending on whether the tale is a tragedy or comedy.

In real life, it is difficult if not impossible to establish causation. In fact, if you study logical fallacies, you know that one of the most common is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or mistakenly assuming that one event caused another merely because it happened beforehand. Maybe that’s part of what makes fiction so satisfying: we can replay the chain of events and see exactly what caused everything to go to hell in a hand basket. Sure, we guess about the causes of the things that happen to us in our real lives, but when it comes down to it, it’s always just that: a guess.

As a writer, you may rail against the practice of following any plot model and think it’s formulaic, but I know when I think back over my favorite books, they all have some kind of discernible plot structure. Sometimes it’s better to use the tried and true guidelines of your predecessors than to try to completely reinvent the wheel.

A dachshund digression that’s probably TMI

2007-08-24T13:03:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 124

Forgive me. It’s the first week of school, and I’m having trouble focusing on anything other than surviving the madness. Thankfully the dogs' shenanigans never cease to provide fodder for the blog....

If you give it much thought at all, you probably think of urination as a simple means of emptying the bladder. Kasay would concur, but not brother Brodsky.

To him, peeing is a way of laying claim to what he believes is rightfully his. And he has his own bizarre sense of manifest destiny, firmly believing that once his stubby legs have trodden any given piece of dirt, it becomes his private property. On walks, he stores up his urine, strategically parsing it out on a shrub here, a sprig of monkey grass there. Hydrants and fence posts are his favorites. When Kasay relieves himself, Brodsky swoops in after to cover Kasay’s scent with his own.

So I had to laugh a few days ago when the karma gods paid Brodsky a visit. Our next door neighbors have a large shepherd mix named Jacob whom Brodsky can’t stand and who is often allowed to roam around off the leash on his walks.

Jacob happened to be out for his early morning potty break right when we were headed back into the house from ours. As soon as the boys saw Jacob, it was the usual mayhem: Kasay whining and straining at the leash, wanting to go make friends, Brodsky whipped into a fierce barking frenzy, straining just as hard (being considerate dogs, they want to make sure both my biceps get an equal workout), wanting to go attack. Jacob ran over and nuzzled with Kasay a minute before prancing up to our front door and peeing on the bush right beside it.

Brodsky was as infuriated as I’d ever seen him. His bark went from lion to tyrannosaurus rex level. The enemy urinating on the one bush he has to pass every time he enters and leaves his own home!

When Jacob finally went home and the dogs had settled down enough that I felt able to take a step without being pulled over, I led them to the door where, predictably, Brodsky made a beeline for the Jacob-scented shrub, intending to cover over the foul cur’s attempt at claiming his boxwood.

You’ve never seen such a disheartened dachshund as Brodsky when he realized that no matter how high he threw up his back leg, there was simply no way he could reach the much taller dog’s mark.

He’s been trying ever since, though, and will not pass by that shrub without marking it. Let’s hope we get a good rain soon, before he kills the poor plant.

The winning ingredients: plot

2007-08-20T08:28:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 115

Some literary theorists have said all stories can be boiled down to one of two basic plots: Romeo and Juliet or David and Goliath. That tends to make the search to create plot seem deceptively simple. If you’ve ever written fiction, you know how difficult it can be to come up with a plot that is surprising yet feels inevitable, that is both unique and satisfying for the reader.

Plot is the driving force behind fiction, after all; it’s what makes a story a story. Our need for story is a primeval one, dating back to preliterate times when our ancestors gathered around fires asking, “And then what happened?”

I will admit that, for the short-short story contest, Brian and I prefer stories that are complete, with beginnings, middles, and endings, over the slice-of-life Carveresque pieces that leave us flipping the page over, wondering whether the last paragraph got cut off. For the best first chapter contest, we look for plot potential, whether a conflict has been established that’s interesting and complex enough to carry the reader through.

"Everybody Change Places!" by M. J. Amft, Part 3

2007-08-17T07:19:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 110

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 1

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 2

Sometimes the hunch to try “everyone change places!” comes partway through a story. One of mine was coming along nicely. A funny, bossy mother was advising her daughter not to moon over a summer romance, waiting for a Christmas reunion. In the background (away at college) there was a sympathetic sister. The characters were lively and the dialogue bright, but who really listens to a mother or sister? Change places! I sent the girl off to college, killed off the sister, shoved mama in the background, and gave the girl a funny, bossy roommate and sold that story.

I once saw a young nursemaid at a summer resort. She was dimwitted, with a homely face and a figure like Sophia Loren’s. A young boy was snowing her but behind her back snickering about the “good time” he was going to have with her before he dumped her. I tried writing a story from her point of view, but I couldn’t identify with a stupid, slow but physically full-blown girl, and I didn’t think Seventeen readers could either. So I tried changing point of view to the boy’s side. But no one can see himself as a complete cad, and the boy began developing redeeming features, seeing the girl as an unfortunate human being, not just “a body.” Still she was out of his class, and when (on the last page) his snobbish cousins, a boy and a girl, appeared, he had to snub the girl to save face. Just before slipping the story into the brown envelope, I read it one more time. The hero seemed unbelievable. He had gone through too many character changes in too short a time, and the last-page cousins interested me more than anyone.

Out came my lethal pen. I killed off the hero. I had the girl cousin become the main character and the storyteller. She became the one who met and befriended the voluptuous dimwit. She sat helplessly by while the cad cousin made his plans, and a totally new hero came out of nowhere and wrapped the story up in a surprising and most satisfactory way. That story sold.

It is hard to mutilate your characters. It is hard to write fiction. You have to start with so little: a brief scene glimpsed; a sentence overhead; an old emotion suddenly remembered; an outstanding face; someone’s trite tale of woe or joy. From these small kernels you must create characters who are real; who act, react, and interact. But as a fiction writer you have one big advantage. If your characters are not right for the part, you can command them to change roles. They are your characters, and if it will make for a better story, you can make a handsome hero change places with an ugly girl. If there is something wrong with your mother, you can try her out as a father. If a big brother becomes too sentimental, you can tell him to be a little sister.

Be bossy with your characters. Shove them around. Be courageous. Pick up your pen and give them the order: “Everybody change places! Now!” While your pen is slashing—altering genders, changing ages, shifting loyalties—you’ll feel pain, and sometimes it won’t even work. But if it does—ah! Your labor will be forgotten in the knowledge that thousands will read your story; some will reread it; some will share it with friends; and some will never completely forget it.

"Everybody Change Places!" by M. J. Amft, Part 2

2007-08-15T08:12:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 105

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places" Part 1

I had once known a real Ronnie, a very handsome, very wealthy Ivy Leaguer who broke a tiny bone in his wrist. That bone would not heal. For nine months casts were removed only to be replaced immediately, He was a boy who had everything, including a swimming pool, a tennis court, his own baseball diamond, and a glamorous girlfriend. But he also had that damned cast. He seemed like a good character for a Seventeen story.

So while he was off in New York having surgery on the wrist, I dreamed up the candy striper. As soon as the real Ronnie met the make-believe Gay, the story flowed as fast as I could write. But that ending…

I uncapped my all-powerful pen. With it I yanked Gay out of that red and white uniform. I made her much more beautiful, very rich, and slightly spoiled. And I broke her wrist. I pulled Ronnie out of bed, healed his bone, took away all his money and rich friends, and made him a lowly part-time City College student and lab technician. I pulled Gay’s drab visitor out of the past, stuck him in the present, changed him into a girl who liked Ronnie, gave him a nurse’s aide uniform, and christened him Jenny. I could do it. They were my characters.

When beautiful Gay left that hospital, Ronnie didn’t wait, hoping for a call. He called her. When she wasn’t home, he called again, and when she was busy he asked her when she would not be busy. And he got the message, loud and clear, got it in a way that no girl ever would; because he was a boy, with that masculine inner core of toughness, he could appreciate a final twist of irony that I added.

I re-typed the battle-scarred manuscript and sold it.

To be continued...

“Everybody Change Places!” Part 1

2007-08-13T08:12:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 102

Despite the fact that this is going to make my entries seem lifeless and uninspired in comparison, I’m going to have a guest blogger this week. I dug up this article, written by my late grandmother M. J. Amft and published in The Writer magazine in 1969 and thought it’d be a shame not to share it. And it fits perfectly with our current topic of characterization.

I need to get a more complete bio put together, but in the meantime, here’s the ‘About the Author’ blurb they published at the bottom of the first column: “M. J. Amft has had more than thirty stories published in Seventeen. Two of these were reprinted in an anthology, Seventeen from Seventeen (Macmillan), another in a high school literature textbook, Counterpoint in Literature (Scott, Foresman), and another translated and reprinted in a Swedish teenage magazine, Bild. Mrs. Amft’s record is an encouraging one for the free-lance writer, since, she writes, ‘I have never had an agent, never had any “ins” with anyone, have never met a Seventeen editor, did all my own typing (even though I’m a rotten typist), and had to be on duty as “Mother” during all the writing.’”

EVERYBODY CHANGE PLACES!

By M. J. Amft

Your story has an instant-appeal beginning, a smooth-toned, fast-paced middle, and an end. It is slanted for a definite market, and it’s all typed, ready to go. But there is something wrong with that story.

This may be a story saved by, “When I say, ‘Go!’ everybody change places!”

No matter that your characters are very much alive. You made them, and you can unmake them. They are your characters, and you can shake them all up and turn mothers into fathers, boys into girls, minor villains into major heroes. You have the power. All you need is the courage and a pen.

My neatly typed story was the tale of a glamorous boy, stuck in a hospital bed, bored to death, and happy to have a nice little candy striper while away the dreary hours. When he left the hospital, he forgot all about her and went back to his glamorous life. You saw the story from her viewpoint, and you knew how painful it was for her. She took it philosophically—remembering that she too had treated a devoted but drab visitor of her own, when she was once a patient, in much the same way—but you knew how crushed she was that with this charming boy it was all over, permanently.

“All over, permanently!” That was what was wrong! A girl never realizes that it is all over (unless she reads a wedding announcement, and this boy was too young for that). A girl always has hope. Maybe he is trying to reach her and somehow just missing her each time. Maybe he is ill or his parents have whisked him halfway around the world. A girl can go on hoping and on and on waiting. But boys don’t have to wait and hope! Boys can, and do, pursue the issue.

“O.K., Ronnie,” I said. “You are going to be a girl, and you, my little candy striper, are going to be a boy.”

To be continued…

A tip about antiheroes

2007-08-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 97

In How to Write Best Selling Fiction, Dean Koontz emphasizes the importance of a likeable main character. Then again, that advice was published twenty-five years ago…and besides, maybe your goal isn’t to write a bestseller. (Don’t laugh.)

If you decide to go the antihero route but still want to have broad appeal, I have two words for you: ironic distance. This is your subtle way of showing the reader that you are not your main character. You know she’s flawed and hateful, and you do not approve of her actions.

How does one establish ironic distance? You could go into another character’s POV and let him say what you really think about your antihero, or have someone tell off the jerk, or of course your could turn karma loose on her.

Reading about a sleaze who just keeps sleazing around damaging people with impunity may keep the pages turning, but it can leave your reader feeling depressed and dirty. Reading about a sleaze who gets a brilliant telling-off and/or a satisfying comeuppance can be cathartic and leave you reader cheering, “Thus be it ever to tyrants!”

Back to character likeableness

2007-08-08T07:57:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 93

A recent Time article (“Antiheroine Chic” from the 8/6 issue) got me thinking about the whole sticky subject of likeable characters again. The article’s premise is that Tony Soprano single-handedly changed television forever, opening the floodgates for more complex, unlikeable main characters.

It’s funny because Brian and I, having recently Netflixed all the back seasons of The Sopranos, were talking just the other day about whether an antihero as dark as Tony would be as popular in book form. We concluded that he probably wouldn’t. A novel is a much bigger commitment of your time and mental energy than a weekly television show. I’m not sure a mass audience would want to read themselves to sleep with Tony and Carmela every night.

A novel with a despicable main character is likely to generate the dreaded criticisms, “I didn’t connect with the character,” or “I didn’t care about the character”—if not from agents and editors who reject it, then from readers. It is a tricky road to travel. Like everything writing-related, it’s all subjective, and a main character that gives one person the warm fuzzies could very well make another’s skin crawl.

Let’s continue with the example of Tony Soprano. The Time article calls him a “good-bad guy,” a “villain with sympathetic qualities.” I’d call him a straight antihero with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Still, it was hard to stop watching the trainwreck, although I’ll admit I was never pulling for T. Which I think is why it would be a hard sell as a book. Mainstream audiences don’t tend to read about someone they aren’t in some way rooting for.

Of course Brian and I are lucky; as contest judges, we don’t have to concern ourselves with marketability, just with how intriguing and believable the characters are.

DD: Doctors of Desqueakification

2007-08-06T08:59:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 87

It’s too damned hot to think about writing today…which can only mean it’s time for another dachshund digression.

Some dogs play fetch, others hunt, or balance dog biscuits on their snouts, or leap up to catch Frisbees in mid-air, or even warn their masters of impending seizures. I’ll admit that our little guys’ arsenal of tricks is a bit more limited.

Sure, they can sit, heel, and come when called. They can even shake hands dachshund-style (while lying on their backs). But we have discovered their biggest talent: they are champion squeaky disablers. It’s quite an impressive sight, really.

For their one-year anniversary, we bought the dogs matching stuffed cows made of sturdy canvas. We’ve learned to avoid the average furry dog toys. Those are dismembered in seconds. These were heavy duty--cylindrical shaped, with no appendages to tear loose other than the two ears and the snouty nose. Which meant they lasted one whole day.

Kasay and Brodsky’s desqueaking technique is quite methodical. First, they locate the squeaker and clamp down on it repeatedly until the plastic is pierced and the noise is silenced. At least to human ears. Apparently, the dogs can still hear the plastic bladder faintly clicking deep inside and will not rest until, thread by thread, the animal’s outer layer is breached and the squeaker removed and chewed into pulp. Then comes the disembowelment, in which every last bit of fluff is removed from the incision and flung about until the floor looks like it’s covered with clouds. Left behind is the deflated outer layer, which the dogs continue to chew on indefinitely until I hide it away.

Should you disturb the dogs during their surgery for, say, a potty break, they will not be distracted from the task at hand. Brodsky is particularly single-minded and will clamp down on the toy for dear life and give you a fierce growl if you’re foolish enough to try to take it away from him. Best just to let him bring it outside while he does his business. Kasay is a bit easier to distract and will drop anything if you wave a treat in front of his nose.

Day 366 of the occupation, and the dachshunds are training me well. Not only do they devour stuffed toys at $5 a pop, they have devised yet another means of tricking me into showering them with snacks.

Here are your visual aids.
Stage One: Kasay locating the exact position of the squeaker:

Stage Three: Brodsky in the middle of a fluff-ectomy

Notes on characterization: consistency

2007-08-03T08:01:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 85

In a piece of fiction, character inconsistencies make the character less believable and hurt the writer’s credibility. I’m not talking about quirky, unpredictable, stereotype-busting characters (those are good things), I mean unintentional inconsistencies, errors that result from the writer not knowing his character well enough, small things he probably read right over but that stick out to the reader.

For example, you might have your animal rights activist hero come home and casually kick the cat after a hard day of protesting dog fighting…or your poverty-stricken teenagers from the ‘hood might use an expensive sushi restaurant as their favorite hangout spot. Without a lot of explaining, your reader is going to suspect you don’t know much about what it’s like to be an animal rights activist or an underprivileged young person.

Hollywood is especially guilty of this as far as settings go. Have you ever noticed how, in the movies, characters who are supposed to be financially struggling often manage to live in spacious, lovely homes or apartments? Even when the setting is a really expensive real estate market like the West Coast or Manhattan? I guess these directors are more concerned about visual appeal than realism.

I think a lot of times character slip-ups are the result of a writer writing what she doesn’t know. She thinks to herself how interesting it would be to have her main character work as a NASCAR pit crew chief. She herself has never watched a single race and knows nothing about auto mechanics. And that’s fine—it will be a challenge, but with a lot of research, a good writer can pull it off. But even better would be if this writer could seek out someone with a connection to this type of person (a pit crew worker would be fantastic, but even the spouse or cousin or sibling of one would be better than nothing) who could read her draft and point out anything glaringly out of place.

All the little details of your character should add up to form a cohesive picture in the reader’s mind, so be on the lookout for these types of errors when you’re revising, and by all means, get an expert reader if at all possible. You can use an inconsistency to give your character some interesting quirks and dimensionality, but if that’s your intention, you have to draw attention to the inconsistency and explain it.

So if for example you see your no-nonsense, frugal grandmother character throwing on a pair of cashmere socks, you should probably either revise that and make her wear her late husband’s ancient athletic socks with the toes blown out or add a line explaining that granny has a weakness for fancy accessories as her one extravagance. Otherwise it just reads like a mistake.

Character names

2007-08-01T07:44:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 82

While we don’t take them into consideration when scoring your contest submissions, I will admit I am a bit obsessed with character names. Maybe it’s leftover from my days as an English major. Unlike those science and math majors (of whom I continue to be jealous), our knowledge didn’t necessarily build on itself from basic concepts to advanced ones; the stories you read as a senior didn’t necessarily have anything to do with (or require that you remember) the stories you’d read as a freshman. Sadly, I’ve forgotten much of the literature I’ve read over the years. I have an especially poor memory for character names, so I am always glad to see unusual ones.

Cholly Breedlove, Ophelia, Addie Bundren, Tea Cake—those’ll find a spot in your brain to latch onto for a good long time. I find it difficult to get into a book when the characters all have bland names—particularly when they start with the same letter or are similar in some other way. I’m sorry, but if you have a Stephen, a Steve, and a Stephanie, I’m going to have a hard time keeping them distinct in my head. You probably know multiple people named John and Mary in real life, but it’s confusing for your reader to let your characters share names, unless of course you want to use last names or nicknames.

You can push unique names too far. A character’s name, in my mind, conveys something about the character, but it says something about the character’s parents too. The illusion you want to create is that this is a real person, named by another real person or persons, not by you, The Author. So if your heroine is a 35-year-old New Age hippie chick named Chakra, you’d better not say her parents are conservative Southern Baptists, unless you reveal that Chakra chose that moniker herself and that her birth name was something more along the lines of Charlene.

The more off-the-wall character names you use, the more memorable they will be, but the more likely it is that you need to explain the name’s origin somewhere in your story. Brian is really good at this. His hero in Morning Glory’s Long Lost Order of Worship is called Steer McAlilly. Within the first 30 or so pages of the novel, Brian tells the story of how the nickname ‘Steer’ came about. It’s a funny story and one that reveals a lot about Steer, his father, and his grandfather. So not only does the reader get an unforgettable name but also a glimpse into the family dynamics and a sense of the character as a real, three-dimensional person, not a phantasm plucked from the author’s imagination.

How I spent my summer vacation

2007-07-30T09:29:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 82

Just back from vacation to find an inbox full of submissions. :) Only one month left for this year’s short-short story contest, so don’t tarry.

I brought two novels on the trip, but sadly they were both so bad I couldn’t get past the first 10 pages. There was a time I could slog my way through just about anything, but I just don’t have the patience for reading bad fiction anymore. Makes my skin crawl and my blood pressure go up and puts me in a distinctly unvacationy state of mind.

So we fell back on the ultimate vacation luxury in the evenings: cable TV (we have rabbit ears at home). That was exciting for the first hour, till we realized this particular hotel’s cable package basically consisted of three channels of Showtime, three ESPNs, three CNNs, and the Discovery Channel (which now seems to focus primarily on blowing things up and building things—I didn’t get to see a single cute fuzzy critter). To Brian’s dismay, none of the ESPNs seem to actually show sports anymore but consist of nonstop talking head shows which recycle their content every 30 minutes or so, CNN-style.

We did get to watch baseball on TBS. I don’t follow baseball but found it disconcerting that for four consecutive nights we watched the Giants play the Braves. I felt like we were in a time warp. Barry Bonds didn’t hit a single homer either.

We acted literary just long enough to pay our respects to Thomas Wolfe and William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name, O. Henry) in the lovely Riverside Cemetery. They both died young, but I found myself even more saddened wondering how their careers would play out if they were writing today.

Most of Porter’s short story markets have dried up, gone under, or no longer pay enough to sustain even someone as prolific as himself. Maybe he would’ve had a career as a TV writer. But c’mon, there’s no way Wolfe’s dense literary prose would be published today. In the immortal words of some anonymous agent with a now-defunct blog, ‘Max Perkins, he dead.’ Hard to find editors willing to take chances now that all the major houses are owned by like four corporations and they don't think twice about firing anyone who doesn't bring in lots of bucks.

Ah well. We’re doing our tiny part to reward excellence in writing and maybe someday the pendulum will swing from the merely marketable back toward art’s favor.

Dachshund digression

2007-07-20T07:53:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 69

I’m going to take a break from thinking about writing today and instead offer you a glimpse of two of the biggest characters in our lives: Brodsky and Kasay.

They provide us with a never-ending supply of amusing antics. Like all the best animal characters (Snoopy, Garfield, John Grogan's Marley), we can’t help but love them even more because of their wide naughty streaks and well-developed sense of rebellion.

Kasay’s weakness is his constant need of attention. And his obsessive chewing. Just a year ago, before the Great Dachshund Adoption of 2006, I used to read in bed most nights. Since I don’t want my brain turning to mush, I’ve tried to reinstitute this simple habit. Now that there’s a dachshund and a half on the bed, it’s trickier than you might think.

Brodsky, an veteran of unknown age (but definitely older than Kasay) who’s spent time in the pound and God only knows how many non-forever homes, is a warrior. He can sleep even in the most unforgiving of environments and would let you read till dawn.

But as long as there’s a light shining in his general direction, Kasay thinks it’s showtime. Maybe he thinks the clamp-on lamp on the headboard is a spotlight and we expect him to put on a song and dance routine. He makes weird Scooby Doo-esque yelp/whine noises, he jumps from one side of the bed to the other, he twists around on his back like a break dancer.

Last night I thought he was tired enough to give me a few minutes to read. Just when I got engrossed, arguing in my head with Rilke’s advice in his Letters to a Young Poet, I see the text shift ever so slowly to the left. I look over to discover that Kasay has crept up and gripped the corner of the book in his mouth, tugging gingerly, as if as long as he’s verrrrry quiet and sneaky, I won’t notice.

As you can see, paper shredding is one of his hobbies, so I had to give up and hide the book away. Who knows--maybe someday I’ll get that train of thought back for future writing-related blog ruminations.

Character inspiration

2007-07-18T07:57:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 65

So where do you get your character ideas from? Sure, it's helpful to answer those character questionnaires I mentioned earlier, but how do you avoid coming up with a string of random answers that don’t gel together into a cohesive and comprehensible whole?

You might model your characters on real people you know. In fact, that probably always happens, even when it’s subconscious. Your ability to create believable characters is based on your past experience with and knowledge of real, living characters. Just be careful and try to make sure they can’t identify themselves in your work. You don't want your writing success to cost you your friends. Just ask Thomas Wolfe or Truman Capote or Pat Conroy. So be sneaky about it, for heaven’s sake! Nobody likes portraits of themselves unless the artist draws a highly idealized version of the truth.

Some other ideas for finding character types are the many and varied personality classifications out there. You may not believe in numerology, astrology, the Chinese zodiac, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Insights Discovery test, and all the rest, but they do offer detailed and mostly coherent personality sketches that might be helpful as models in the construction of your character. Read over the results pages and see if any of the types fit what you had in mind for your character.

I don’t recommend going around telling your readers that your hero’s Lifepath Number is 4 or that she’s a Capricorn with Leo rising, born in the year of the Metal Dragon, is an ENFP, or that her dominant energy is earth green. But if you’ve chosen one of these types as a basic guide, it can provide you with a handy launching pad for when you’re getting started and a touchstone when you start to lose your bearings.

Notes on characterization: You are the puppet master

2007-07-16T09:22:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 63

Back to the likeability question for a moment…

You should have a basic idea how you want your reader to feel about each character and you should manipulate them (both the character and the reader) in order to achieve the desired reaction. Beware of unintentionally letting unlikeable traits slip into your supposedly sympathetic character and vice versa. (A little bit of intentional gray thrown into the black and white is a different matter.)

If you’re writing literary fiction, you have more room for ambiguity, but in most commercial genres, you want your reader pulling for the good guys and shaking their fists in rage at the bad guys. If your protagonist accidentally turns your reader off and your villain starts becoming the most likeable person in the story, you have a problem. Of course you can have an antihero, but the point is you need to be in control of whose side the reader is on.

This is where a trusted second reader is essential, because you need to get an objective opinion of how your characters’ actions come across. Here’s an example: I once worked with a woman who was furious because various neighborhood cats would get into her backyard and sit on her patio furniture (the horror!). She described with relish her solution to this problem: she set up baited traps on her patio and hauled her neighbors’ beloved cats off to the pound, never mentioning what she’d done when she later saw them frantically searching for their missing pets.

It was obvious that this woman was proud of her creative problem-solving skills, and were she writing about the incident, I’m sure she would paint herself as the heroine. No matter how artfully she describes what happened, though, the cat trapper is going to come across as sympathetic as Cruella De Ville. But she couldn’t see how vile her actions would look to someone else.

So grill your second reader on her feelings about each character. Of course there will be differing shades of interpretation, but take note of any reactions that are way off your intended mark so that you can fix them in the rewrite.

The winning ingredients: other characters

2007-07-13T07:52:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62

In addition to your main character, your contest entry is judged based on its minor characters. No man is an island, right? We use this category in a broad sense, in that sometimes the setting, an animal, or even an inanimate object can serve as a sort of character.

Especially in a short-short story, you may not have the luxury of fully fleshing out all of your characters. Your peripheral characters may be loosely drawn and two-dimensional out of necessity, but they must at least serve a vital function in the story, and the more little shots of individuality you can inject into them, the better.

Beware of stereotypes. If you find yourself falling into one, try doing one small thing to turn the stereotype on its head, and the payoff will be substantial. For example, a friend of mine who’s an avid reader recently mentioned how sick she is of the obligatory gay male sidekick in chick lit novels. Why not let the heroine have a gay male rival, or a lesbian sidekick, or an elderly woman friend? The world is full of strange bedfellows and unexpected relationships, and those are infinitely more fun to explore than the same-old, same-old stereotypes.

I’m not well-read as far as chick lit goes, so for all I know the examples above may have been done to death too, which raises another point: try to stay current in your chosen genre. Reading a lot always helps your writing, and if you read what your ‘competition’ is writing, you can see what works in your particular field, what doesn’t, how your work fits in with your contemporaries’ works, and how it’s unique.

Now that you’ve gotten acquainted with your hero….do you like him?

2007-07-11T08:18:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62

Brian and I happen to be of the mindset that your story’s hero need not be heroic, which might sound a bit odd.

It seems that, particularly in certain genres, the powers that be tell writers that their protagonists must be likeable, someone the reader admires. You know, like the strong and sassy lady detective with the smokin bod and Holmesian abilities who flosses twice a day and never forgets to water her houseplants and whose only flaws are her driving ambition and obsessive perfectionism. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, in that likeable traits can be pushed so far that the character ends up coming across as unlikeable, but you get the general idea.

Brian and I don’t agree that the reader must admire your protagonist. To us, it’s more important that your main character come across as believable yet oddly fascinating. Think of it in terms of a dinner party full of strangers. You might be introduced to a very nice yuppie soccer mom, the kind of woman you’d invite into your home for a book club meeting or ask to babysit your children with no hesitation.

Then there’s the slightly creepy tattooed guy lurking in the corner, telling stories to a small throng of intrigued listeners. You might want to become friends with the woman, but your curiosity would likely be more piqued by the man. His twisted psyche is the one you’d want to peek into; if you had to choose, his secrets are the ones you’d want to learn. Likewise, your reader will likely be more drawn to someone whose world is a bit different than her own.

The winning ingredients: hero

2007-07-09T08:14:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62 – We seem to have hit some kind of midsummer standstill here…

Moving on to another element from the contest scorecard…the hero. Every story has one, whether you call her your main character, protagonist, chief sufferer, antihero, etc.

Sometimes we get contest entries in which the hero is sort of a hazy, undefined figure. I get the feeling the writer is just barely acquainted with his character and is using the actual writing as a means of learning more about his protagonist. But that should really take place during the brainstorming and note-taking phase of writing.

By the time you have a final draft ready to send out into the world, you should know your hero intimately. The better you know your character, the more she will come to life. Just one of what must be plenty of good books on this subject is Robert Peck’s Fiction is Folks: How to Create Unforgettable Characters.

A good exercise he recommends is one actors often use. They delve into their characters by asking and answering extensive lists of questions about the character. What motivates her? What is her biggest dream and most crippling fear? Where did she grow up? What was she like in high school? And so on.

The answers to these questions need not appear in the text, but if you as creator have a handle on the answers, your character will come across as a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional being to your reader, and her words and actions will be easier for you to imagine.

Tying up a loose end about dialogue

2007-07-05T12:56:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62

Brian said I need to provide concrete examples of our dialogue pet peeves. I almost included some from popular fiction originally, but I hate to point fingers and name names. So I will take the weasel’s way out and give you some examples from television. TV is easy to make fun of. And yes, I know I watch way too much of it.

So let’s get specific:

Chock fulla clichés: Turn on most any daytime soap and you will be bombarded with a wave of boring clichés. Admittedly, I haven’t watched any since high school, so to test my theory I turned one on yesterday since I had the day off. I was rewarded with this gem almost instantly:

“Your love is the only thing that’s kept me going these last few months. You have to love me. We were meant to be a couple. I can make you happy in ways you can’t even imagine. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done because I love you,” said a weirdo in a mask and strange half-and-half costume. I think it was a woman, but it’s hard to say.
“You drugged me with chloroform, stripped me naked, tied me to a chair, and threatened my life. You have a strange way of showing love,” said the kidnapped fellow, who, at least in this scene, was awake, fully clothed, and moving about freely.

I felt like I’d hit the jackpot: a two-in-one example! Not only is it full of cringe-worthy clichés, but it can also serve as an example of the…

Barbara Walters interview: OK, so technically it isn’t a Q&A session, but both of the two characters in the room know what the strange masked kidnapper did to the guy—why on earth would he list the offenses like that, except as a recap/information dump for viewers? Awkward!

This device more often crops up in sci fi or fantasy genres. The writer has made up certain rules for her fictitious world and must somehow convey these rules, so she make the characters question each other about them. But the characters would have no reason to discuss this any more than you and I might have the following conversation:

“How do you get to work every day?” you ask.
“I drive my car.”
“I see. And what is a car?”
“It’s this machine with an engine and wheels that transports you from one place to another,” I reply.
“How do you make it go?”
“I put a key into the ignition and turn it while pressing down on the gas pedal.”
“How does it know where to take you?” and so on.

So you get my point—if we had this conversation in real life, I would be wondering if you’d suffered extreme memory loss or were brought up in an impossibly cloistered Amish community, but this would not constitute a typical, casual conversation.

Terminally cute: I have two words for you: Gilmore Girls. I apologize to fans, and maybe I haven’t given this show a chance since I've only watched it once. I turned it on one night when I couldn’t find anything else, and the daughter spewed I think 5 cynically witty one-liners in the first 90 seconds. OK, so she is a smart and funny and cynical college student. I’ll go with it.

Then her mother opened her mouth and did the exact same thing. And so did the mother’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s best friend. And the grandmother. Cute line overload! These characters all share the same brain! The illusion that these words were spoken by six distinct people with different voices and personalities was completely shattered. It was impossible to ignore the fact that these lines were written by the same person (or persons). You want your readers to hear and see your characters, not the person behind the curtain.

Arguing as a substitute for real drama: You see this a lot on cop shows. You have your major 'A' story line and your lesser B and C subplots, but then, somewhere around letter G or H, there’s a sub-sub-subplot that never amounts to anything: a scene where the supervisor yells at the protagonist about his unorthodox (albeit effective) investigative methods. My problem with this is, like I said, it never amounts to anything and in no way contributes to the story except to tack on some cheap conflict.

And the dialogue itself usually bugs me too. I’ve worked in a lot of places (never a police station, but still), and when a supervisor calls in an employee for an upbraiding, it doesn’t usually sound like a 150-decibel, profanity-laced tantrum. Usually the supervisor dreads these talks and has been up all night carefully crafting the exact way to phrase the complaint in order to avoid a lawsuit, and sometimes the employee goes postal, but usually both parties are kind of silently pissed but manage to keep up their professional decorum. They save their ranting and raving for after work hours in the safety of their homes. That may not make for good TV, but all the fists pounding on desks and empty threats and insults don’t give me an adrenaline rush, they just make me roll my eyes.

Too much profanity: Hmmm. We don’t have cable, so I will have to take an example from the movies for this one. As much as I enjoyed The Big Lebowski, I seem to recall that just about every line contained the F word. I remember Brian saying that if you added up all the times that word and its variants were uttered in the movie, it would amount to about 5 minutes’ worth of screen time. We speculated that the screenwriter had a 115-page script and wanted to get to that magic number 120, so he went back in and injected hundreds of four-letter words for the sake of padding. I just don’t know many adults who go around talking this way, so I never find it believable.

Naked dialogue: The next two cannot apply to TV since you pretty much always know who’s talking and what they’re doing at the same time and you can hear accents, so I will be bold and name literary names. I seem to recall Hemingway doing this an awful lot. One of the many reasons he is not a favorite of mine… I don't want to have to read a page two or three times to figure out who's saying which line.

Phonetic dialogue: I hated Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper when I was a teenager just because of their phonetic spellings in dialogue. I later decided that Twain was worth slogging through and forgiving. Not so Cooper.

This blog entry is like three times longer than the two general entries on dialogue put together, which illustrates a bonus writing tip: when you get specific, you will have lots of material and much more text.

I can't seem to shut up about dialogue

2007-07-02T08:02:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62

A couple more dialogue pet peeves I thought of...

Phonetic spelling: Regional differences in language are fascinating, and it is a good idea to incorporate them into your writing to give it a sense of place and to make your characters’ voices authentic and distinctive. But please, please, resist the urge to use a bunch of phonetic spellings in dialogue to convey an accent.

It’s just too much work for your poor reader, who will most likely be forced to mouth the lines aloud in order to decipher their meaning. So listen closely to the dialect your characters speak and capture its rhythms, idioms, and quirky grammatical constructions. But I would suggest avoiding doing anything that makes your reader feel like he has to translate your work from a foreign language. A frustrated reader usually = an abandoned book or story.

Too much profanity: OK, before you think I’m a hopeless prude, let me explain. There’s nothing wrong with using a little well-placed profanity in your dialogue. Sometimes the situation demands it. But when you let your characters drop the F bomb every other line, it loses its punch. Honestly, one bad word after another is no longer shocking—in fact, it makes for a boring, unoriginal read. I’ve spent time amongst teenaged boys—possibly the foulest-mouthed creatures on the planet. Their language tends to be much more vilely inventive than mere chains of 4-letter words. If you use bad language with a light touch, it will be much more effective.

When good dialogue goes bad

2007-06-29T08:07:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 59

Picking up from where we left off, here are a few of the dialogue pitfalls I referred to earlier:

*Chock fulla clichés: You know them when you see them. They’re constantly trying to worm their way onto your pages. Be ever vigilant against the cliché. Show it no mercy. Strike it dead with your red pen or backspace key. Yes, people do use a lot of clichés in their real life conversations. But you are creating art, not just recording life, and you can do better. Beware of taking it too far in the opposite direction, though, or you might end up with...

*Terminally cute dialogue: It’s good when your characters display flashes of brilliant wit. But when every single line uttered by every single character is an impossibly clever quip, well, as Brian says, the reader can hear the keyboard clacking in the background. She's popped out of the illusion of being inside a believable story. Comedians’ acts are funny nonstop (or at least they should be), but they spend hours crafting, revising, and perfecting them. Nobody is hilarious on the spot, every time he speaks.

*Arguing as a substitute for real drama: You want your story to have conflict and drama, so you make your characters argue. All well and good, but is it a juicy argument, one that advances the plot and reveals something about your characters? Or is it like that Monty Python sketch where the customer pays to have an argument but instead only gets Yes-it-is/No-it-isn’t contradiction? Your story needs conflict, but it needs to be substantial and it needs to go deeper than petty, back-and-forth squabbling.

*The Barbara Walters interview: In an effort to dump a whole bunch of information on your reader, you have one character pose a series of questions to another. Problem is, both characters know the answers full well, and if they were actual people, would have no reason whatsoever to ask each other such questions. Find a better way to reveal information to your reader, and avoid long Q&A sessions.

*Naked dialogue: No tags, no gestures, just line after line of characters talking. Your reader loses track of who is saying which line. The image of what’s actually going on in the scene goes black and the reader is popped out of the story and reminded that she is sitting in a room alone looking at words on a page. Not the effect you want. The he-said/she-said tags may seem repetitive to you, but believe me, the scene will read faster with them than without.

Oh and I think this has been said a million times, but it bears repeating: there is nothing wrong with repeating “said,” so avoid the temptation to pull out your thesaurus and stick in a bunch of "said" synonyms like “declared,” “intoned,” “stated,” “uttered,” “announced,” etc. The “said”s will disappear into the page, but the five dollar replacement words will jar the flow of your writing and stick out awkwardly.

OK, I think that covers most of the glaring dialogue gaffes we see. As with all writing "rules," they are in no way absolute, so take them with a grain of salt and use them as you see fit.

The winning ingredients: dialogue

2007-06-27T08:11:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 58

As promised (and in no particular order), allow me to explain a bit more about what Brian and I look for when judging contest entries.

Dialogue: such a deceptively simple part of a story. Unless all of your characters have taken vows of silence (now wouldn’t that be a fun read), you’re going to need them to talk to each other.

It seems so easy. You probably talk and listen to people all day long, possibly even chewing gum at the same time. How hard could it be to get some decent dialogue down in black and white?

In a word: very. There are so many pitfalls that can arise when your characters open their mouths and assert their First Amendment rights. Next time, I will go into detail on some of the ways dialogue can go wrong and set off our stinky-writing detectors.

But let’s start off positive. In our opinion, good dialogue is a subtle balancing act. It rings true enough to be believable. It has a quality of invisibility, in which the reader is drawn into imagining the story to the point that he almost forgets he’s reading words on a page. But it’s also more than a transcription of a real conversation. It’s interesting and compelling, and it serves to advance the plot and expose your characters’ fears and desires. A tall order to be sure, but by no means impossible.

What's genre got to do with it?

2007-06-25T09:35:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 56

We get entries from every conceivable genre, especially when it’s Best First Chapter submission time. Sometimes people inquire whether we accept a certain genre (usually children’s or YA). We tell them we’re open to anything.

You may wonder, though, how it’s possible to compare writing across the genres, and whether we favor certain types of stories. Brian and I are both eclectic readers who appreciate a wide range of writing styles.

I will admit we each have one specific genre we aren’t wild about as a general rule, but there are exceptions, and we both enjoy high quality writing, even when it’s in a genre we don’t usually care for. Plus, Brian is a fan of my least-favorite genre and vice versa, so again it evens out, and we try very hard to be fair.

We use the same scorecard regardless of genre, because different types of fiction share some common denominators—theme, plot, characterization, protagonist, dialogue, presentation. We take into account what is appropriate for the genre the author is working under. For example, a literary piece in which very little happens doesn’t necessarily get marked down on plot, whereas an action-less murder mystery does. The finalists are entries that display excellence in whatever genre we think the author is aiming for.

Where are they now?

2007-06-22T08:14:00.001-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 51

E.E. King, our very first contest winner, passed along some exciting news to Brian the other day. Her short story, “Dirk Snigby’s Guide to the Afterlife” has been anthologized in Next Stop Hollywood (St. Martins, 2007), a collection of 15 previously unpublished stories deemed suitable for film adaptation. Her story was chosen from over 600 entries.

She will be having a book party/reading on July 6th at 7:00 p.m. at Dutton’s in Brentwood, CA. Now you have a chance to read Evie’s work and see just how deserving she is of being our inaugural short-short story winner. The book’s a bargain at less than twelve bucks on Amazon and would make a nice Father’s Day gift (wait, I’m probably the only super-slacker out there who STILL hasn’t mailed out her Father’s Day package…but I bet you know someone who has a birthday coming up or something).

Evie actually submitted “Dirk Snigby,” so I can personally attest to what a delightful, original story it is. When we chose “The Tragedy of Dewy C. McCray” as our winner, we had to disqualify her other entry to comply with our two-year rule. After all, we don’t want any dynasties or to be accused of favoritism.

Here's a picture we didn't get to use on our winner's page but was still lurking around on my computer. A lovely shot of E. E. King with a weimaraner.

Our sincere congrats to Evie!

Short (attention span) stories

2007-06-20T07:54:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 51

Of the two InnermoonLit contests, the Best First Chapter is definitely more popular than the Short-Short Story. We receive many more entries for it, which I assume is because short stories just aren’t as marketable as novels, especially very short stories.

I personally love reading these little self-contained gems. In fact, I find them easier to judge than the first chapter submissions, which, when they’re good, leave me hanging, wishing I could flip over to chapter two. As a novelist himself, I think Brian prefers judging the chapters, because he is so good at seeing whether the foundation for a good novel is there. So it balances out. He is super focused; I have a short attention span.

If our 500-word limit on this contest seems extreme…well, I guess it is. In addition to my puny attention span, we are governed by practical concerns. When we were developing the contest guidelines, we were concerned that we’d get stuck printing out thousands of entries. So far that hasn’t happened, and we still seem to be a fairly well-kept secret, with a manageable volume of submissions and reasonable paper and toner expenses.

But I have to wonder why there isn’t a bigger market for flash fiction. Most people don’t spend a whole lot of time reading, and the idea of getting a complete, satisfying narrative read in a few minute’s time seems like it would be appealing to a pretty wide audience. Super-short stories are also well-suited for reading online, where eye strain is a serious limiting factor. I don’t see why the market for short-short stories doesn’t expand, particularly among electronic publications, and I really hope it will.

Who are you?

2007-06-18T08:03:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 49

OK, I’m going to make a nagging suggestion today: writers and aspiring writers should have a current head shot and biography at their fingertips. I know, bios are a supreme pain to write and if you’re like me, you probably feel like a jerk writing about your accomplishments and how wonderful you are—and we all hate getting our picture taken.

I got to thinking about this because my dean (she’s ‘mine’ because I’m her assistant, see) has recently begun asking all faculty members to update their vitas each year when they complete their annual reports. Partly, it’s a requirement for the accreditors, but it’s also important for faculty to have current c.v.s when they go up for tenure, promotion, or post-tenure review, apply for grants, appear as speakers or experts, are nominated for awards, and, of course, if they should happen to need or want to go back out on the job market. The point being, it never hurts to have something like this at the ready.

If you’re new to writing, take some time to come up with a bio, even if it’s short. There’s also the old exercise where you fake it and write up your dream resume, which can be a very helpful way of spelling out your goals and figuring out concrete ways to move toward those dreams. Just don’t try to pass off your dream bio as your true bio. :p

If you’re more seasoned, it’s tempting to write your bio once and forget about it, but give it a read at least once a year, making sure to add all your latest accomplishments. You never know when a success will fall into your lap, and this way you won’t have to put something together under pressure but can just relax and fully enjoy the victory.

Visual Aids

2007-06-15T08:06:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 46

Brian told me the other day he likes all the pictures I put up here, and I guess posting pics of address books, money orders, and gargantuan shredders is a wee bit out of the ordinary.

I’ve always needed visual aids, maybe because my parents (along with other assorted family members) are artists. This became a sort of inside joke when I held my one and only job as a supervisor.

/cue the flashback music/

It was my freshman year of college, and in the fall I worked as a production assistant on The Oberlin Review, the weekly student newspaper. I doubt this position even exists anymore, but I liked it. We laid out the paper—stories, headlines, photos, ads, and all—using wax, exacto knives, light boxes, and pretty blue non-photo-repro pens. I believe they switched to PageMaker the very next year. But we were old school.

Anyway, in spring I was promoted to production manager (actually I think nobody else wanted to do it), which meant another girl and I shared the responsibility of supervising the production workers. Now, the student who’d been my production manager the previous semester had an intimidating way of communicating her expectations to the staff.

The paper came out on Friday, and she met with us on Saturday. The meetings consisted of her scrutinizing the paper page by page, picking out every orphan, widow, crooked line of text, poorly cropped photo, misaligned column, unevenly spaced block of text, and other assorted egregious errors. Then she’d bark, “Who the $&#@ laid out this page?! It looks like %#^*!” We all sat cowed in utter terror, holding our breath while she gave us our upbraiding and told us the right way to do things. (She was scary as hell but ended up being one of my closest friends from Oberlin.)

Anyway. If you knew me, you’d know I had no chance of mimicking her leadership style. I am a huge conflict avoider. At 18, I was even meeker and wishy-washier than I am now. So when I needed to communicate to my staff the right and wrong way to lay out the paper, I relied on the ultimate go-between: the visual aid.

I made up cute little pictures and posted them all over our work area. I started to get a reputation among the ‘real’ editors in the front offices. More than one person wondered whether I was capable of expressing myself without the use of visual aids. To this day, I’m still not sure, but I’m not going to risk it and try to do without them.

Since I’m on such a tangent today anyway, I will give you a bonus visual aid that has nothing to do with anything (or maybe everything to do with everything) from Daniel Kolak’s In Search of God: The Language and Logic of Belief. Look, a visual aid depicting Pascal’s Wager. Too fun!

So you think you can write?

2007-06-13T07:44:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 46

Maybe I’ve been watching too much reality TV, but the thought of people pursuing dreams for which they may exhibit little promise has been on my mind lately. Simon Cowell and Nigel Lithgoe might think it’s better to crush the dreams of the untalented so they can try their hands at some other pursuit, but I for one don’t want to discourage anyone from writing, and I’m thankful we don’t have to give our entrants face-to-face evaluations. If someone loves to sing or dance, what’s the harm in letting them enjoy it, even if they are terrible at it?

I feel this applies even more so to writing. When I was about 11, my grandmother told me that there are no writing prodigies. Kind of a sad thought for me at the time since I wanted to be instantly, innately great with none of that hard work and practice crap, but now I appreciate how right she was. You have to read good writing, put in lots of time writing, read bad writing, spend lots of time revising, then read, write, and revise still yet more, and on top of all of that, you have to experience life awhile to build up some material and try to figure out something worth saying about the human condition.

My point is, today’s terrible writer could be wonderful in ten years. Brian likes to paraphrase Natalie Goldberg, who said all our bad writing is fertilizer from which the good stuff later grows. Anyone who has ever written has written some stuff that's just plain no good. Besides, even if you never make a dime as a professional writer, it is a worthwhile skill to develop. Sooner or later, you are going to have to write something, be it a resume or a letter of complaint, and the more you write, the better writer you’ll be. So I say if writing is something you enjoy (or probably more accurately, something you feel compelled to do), keep doing it.

How to win the InnermoonLit Award

2007-06-11T09:50:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 42

Ever wonder how contest entries are judged? In our case, we have a system that has evolved over the past couple years.

After the deadline passes and submissions are closed, I serve as the first reader. I separate the entries into three piles: yes, no, and maybe. Depending on how busy the rest of my world is, this can take me awhile—usually a month or two.

Brian devotes several weekend days to judging rather than trying to get it done on writing days. He reads my yes and maybe stacks and develops his own yes/maybe/no piles. He then scores the yeses and maybes to come up with first, second, and third place winners.

He came up with this contest report card and fills one out for each finalist.

(No, you can’t see yours, nor can I even reveal to you whether your entry was one of the finalists. That information has all been sent to the gaping maw. In fact, I’ve told you too much already. Stand back. This blog entry will self-destruct in 90 seconds.)

Brian uses a letter grade system. The entry is graded on a plus/minus scale from A to F on these elements: hero, other characterizations, plot, dialogue, theme, and presentation (I’ll take a more detailed look at each of these in future entries), then those six grades are calculated to get the entry’s overall grade. There’s no Lake Woebegone-esque grade inflation happening around here either. Average writing earns a grade of C.* An A means work that is far above average and substantially exceeds expectations, and those are few and far between.

We talk it over and so far have always come to a consensus, but basically we work like an editor or agent and his/her assistant. I cull the slush pile and Brian makes the final decision on winners.

*OMG, I thought my tongue was going to drop out of my head if I uttered that sentence to my WRIT 101 students one. more. time. last fall. Now you made me say it yet again. Shame on you. :p

Creation, destruction, regeneration: the circle of paper

2007-06-08T08:15:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 41

I don't know about you, but Brian and I are not all that fond of reading computer screens. Those pixels give you a nasty headache after awhile. Right away we knew we’d be printing hard copies of contest entries in order to evaluate them.

The original plan was for Brian to print entries, hole-punch them, and score them as they came in, but that was cutting into his writing time and energy in a big way. It wasn’t as bad as teaching a writing class and grading papers, but it was too close for his taste. Then too, we were concerned that the order in which entries came in could’ve prejudiced the judging (we are human after all), when really that should be irrelevant.

So early on we simplified and came up with our current modus operandi. We print entries as they arrive and put them in a file. I record the email address in my brown book, keeping a running tally of the number of entries received. Then I type the address into my Word file, provided it isn’t already there from a previous submission. I used to use a distribution list, but apparently my software isn’t designed for such volume and it got very slow and clunky.

More details on the judging criteria on Monday. The point is, we do print out entries, but we never hang onto them. Soon after they are safely printed out, we delete the electronic entry. After the final judging, all paper entries are fed to this scary industrial-sized shredder. Don’t worry; they never even see the blades coming.

We do this as a safeguard against any sort of plagiarism. Rest assured, your writing isn’t floating around, vulnerable to idea thieves. Our copy gets destroyed and recycled. Who knows? Maybe some microscopic shreds of your entry will be in the next box of recycled paper you buy.

A little slush never hurt anyone

2007-06-07T12:43:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 41

I guess it’s inevitable that our contests have slush piles: those stacks of submissions that so obviously belong in the ‘no’ pile.

I’ve heard editors and agents complain about the slush pile, and I’m sure you have too. They will do anything to avoid it and usually hire a 22-year-old with a newly minted degree in English to wade through it for them. Kind of like what I do with the InnermoonLit contests, as I serve as the first reader. Except my degree has built up quite a patina over the years.

I don’t know. I kind of like reading the worst of the worst. It takes far less effort on my part. I know it’s a ‘no’ right away without any agonizing or putting it into ‘maybe’ purgatory. Besides, there’s something refreshing about truly bad entries.

See, I am prone to Prufrockian moments of paralyzing self-doubt. I picture our entrants sending their flawed work out, and I have to admire their chutzpah. Are they so new to writing that they are in a world of blissful ignorance where there are no such things as comma splices and faulty parallelism? Or do they think to themselves, This may not be great literature, but what’s the harm in submitting it anyway?

I think most fall into the second category, and those of us who sit on our hands and tell ourselves we should just shut up and stay home because we aren’t good enough should draw inspiration from these brave souls. Like Brian’s grandmother used to tell him, “They can’t knock you down and refuse you too.” Meaning, the worst someone will do is say no, but if you don’t put yourself out there and ask, you’ll definitely never get a yes.

So I say bring on the slush. You just might be in for a surprise—you might think it’s slush, and we might see a winner.

Moonlit booty

2007-06-05T15:02:00.000-05:00

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 40

It's semiannual prize distribution day around here. I went to the post office to purchase the money orders and send out this loot earlier today.

Brian wanted to send Rita Hubbard, our third place winner, a copy of Morning Glory's Long Lost Order of Worship since it's his most recent novel, but then we realized we are fresh out of copies. We decided to send her Shadow Clock, and I think she'll get a kick out of it. It's everything you want in a summertime read: heavy on the suspense and mystery with well-placed dashes of humor and a steamy oceanfront setting.

Prizes should find their way to their rightful owners in a few days. Winners, enjoy! Everybody else, submit again.

Submissions for the short-short story contest have slowed down, so I decided to post a tally of submissions received at the start of each blog entry. Right now, you have about a 1 in 13 chance of winning! I know, the September 1 deadline seems ages away, but you know how fast summer goes by. Submit now so you don't have to remind yourself about it later.

How low-tech can you go?

2007-06-04T12:46:00.000-05:00

Now I'll get back to assuring you that we don’t have any nefarious schemes up our sleeves here.... A lot of people enter the InnermoonLit contests, and yes, we collect their email addresses. But we have never sold nor will we ever sell our mailing list. In fact, we really only compile a mailing list so that we can send out email notifications with the contest results. We don’t bombard our contestants with spam. Need proof? Behold the InnermoonLit mailing list. (Hopefully from this angle, actual addresses are illegible.)

Don’t laugh. I’m sure there’s some way to tell Brian’s computer to automatically compile email addresses off the entry forms, but I don’t know what it is. Heck, I was amazed I was able to figure out how to create a working online form; I felt no need to press my luck and try to get fancy.

I have this fear of losing entrants’ addresses and of them never hearing anything back from us and having them feel like they’d thrown their work into a silent, bottomless abyss. So I use this snazzy book to keep a tally of entries for each contest, then I have an alphabetical list of addresses from all the contests in a Word file that gets copied and pasted into the BCC field at newsletter time.

Rest assured, if you’ve entered one of the InnermoonLit contests or plan to in the future, we will not abuse your address--or do you harm in any other way, for that matter. We are streamlining the newsletter, in fact, so from now on you will just get two brief emails from Brian a year stating that the contest results are available and providing a link to the winners’ page.

We hope you’ll click the link and spend a moment giving mental props to the winning authors (or even checking out their other work if they’re published). But of course that’s optional.

If you happened not to have won and, because of that, your hands are clenched into tight fists of fury and indignation to the point where extension of the index finger into link-clicking position is a physical impossibility, you are free to ignore or delete these biannual messages. Unsubscription is always an option, but that doesn’t involve some automated process the likes of which is used to unsubscribe from the J. Crew mailing list or perhaps the National Well Drillers’ listserv. It just means I’ll look through my big pretty book, draw a line through that addie, and delete it from my Word file. No strings, no catches, no worries.

Results day!

2007-06-01T09:03:00.000-05:00

Well, we cut it close, but we got the contest results posted today. Next time, we really should set a self-imposed deadline two weeks prior to the results deadline so the winners don't have to do such a frantic turnaround with their bios and pictures. Many, many thanks to the winners for getting us their information on such short notice.

The funny thing about judging these contests anonymously is that it's like Eliot and Ransom's (and all the rest's) New Criticism put into practice. (C'mon, don't let your eyes glaze over. Literary theory is kinda fun if you give it a chance.) See, those fellas said literature should be evaluated solely based on what's on the page. You should read and analyze a piece of writing without needing to know a thing about the author's biography, the work's historical context, etc. It was a democratizing idea at the time: no longer were those ivory-tower experts' opinions about a piece of writing any more valid than any other readers'.

Whether you agree with this approach or not (and it has fallen out of favor in the last 40 or so years), it's exactly what we do when we read submissions. In fact, it's what all writing contest judges should be doing. Entries come in with no author-identifying information, and we have no idea who wrote them when, where, how, or why. We just go by the words on the page.

So it's always interesting to see who is behind the entries and learn a bit of their stories, as it really does add depth to our appreciation for the writing. This time, all three happen to be female and all relative newcomers to novel writing. Brian and I are thrilled to be able to provide this small bit of validation to these very talented women early on in their writing careers. We hope it helps propel their work, and we are confident that they'll go far.

The History of the InnermoonLit Contests

2007-05-31T13:59:00.000-05:00

It's almost time to announce the results of the 2007 Best First Chapter of a Novel contest. These are the best two times of year--the announcements and especially the trips to the P.O. to buy the money orders and send the prizes! I think we get as excited as the winners.

Now for a little backstory.

As long as I’ve known Brian, he’s had big ideas. About his own writing, yes, but also about ways to help sustain writing in a broader sense. Here’s someone who’s sacrificed so much and poured his all into writing and who hasn’t yet received the recognition he deserves, and already he wants to give back. It is any wonder I love him so? [I am letting my mushy flag fly freely as we just celebrated our 6 year wedding anniversary last week. I am entitled. :)]

We’ve had extensive talks about starting a small press, down to picking out names, constructing budgets, and investigating all manner of business, legal, and tax minutiae. Time and again, we got discouraged at the state of publishing. Even an editor and publisher has limited power and is at the mercy of the distributors, book store chains, and assorted other members of the filthy lucre set.

If we started our dream press, published what we loved with no considerations about what would actually sell in this world of few readers and even fewer book buyers, it would surely be an endless money pit, not to mention an insane amount of work.

So those aspirations languished, till somewhere along the way Brian had a revelation. We didn’t need to start a press; we could just start a contest. No S-corporation rigmarole, no worries about whether our selections were the most commercial, no authors angry if we published them but were unable to make their books bestsellers, and a much smaller investment of time and money.

Brian decided first thing that he wouldn’t charge entry fees, aghast as he is at how much writers have to pay nowadays to enter most contests. This was never envisioned as a for-profit enterprise but more as a service to art.

We don’t publish the winning entries because that gets us back into purchasing rights, drawing up contracts, and generally acting more like suits than either of us care to. We don’t take snail mail submissions because that would mean you and us both would have to reveal our secret locations to the whole internet. Plus, who wouldn’t rather cut, paste, and hit submit than deal with printing out hard copies and toting them to the post office?

Anyway, that was sometime early in 2005, and the contests have evolved nicely since then. We hope they will continue to grow, so spread the word, will ya?

Ghost in the Machine

2007-05-30T08:54:00.000-05:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled entry because there are some strange things going on with the contest submission form.

On Friday, I received a submission in my Outlook inbox. Which is strange, given that the form is set up to send to Brian's email address. It wasn't forwarded to me or sent directly from the person--it came through the Yahoo webhosting route. This particular entry was either a very late or early Best First Chapter submission (which we are no longer accepting since this year's deadline was March 1 and we don't start taking entries for next year till September 1). So I figured this person had gotten creative and figured out some way to hack the submission form in an attempt to avoid disqualification, even going so far as to figure out my work email address and sending it to me.

Then today, there were three submissions for the Short-Short Story Contest in my inbox. I am confused.

Let me back up and say that, although I'm not a very tech savvy girl, somehow I know just enough to put me in positions where I am responsible for various tech-related things. This is true at my job and with Brian. It's a little bit scary, but I seem to be able to scrape by and figure things out as I go. We built his website together; I am his web author. He tells me what he wants on paper, and I try to execute it electronically.

So whatever is wrong with the form is my doing. I just can't for the life of me figure out what I did. I updated Brian's website (see the new dog pictures under the kayaking photo gallery) and started this blog on Monday, so maybe something weird got embedded in his site then. But that wouldn't explain the Friday entry.

I've gone back into the Yahoo Sitebuilder software, and everything looks correct. The form is set up to mail to his email address. I don't see mine anywhere on the site. Yet I ran two test entries, and both came to my email, not Brian's. Eerie.

I guess it isn't such a big deal really, except it has me wondering if entries could possibly be sent to other strange email addresses at random. Is someone in Australia receiving mysterious short-short stories? And how would we ever know?

If anybody out there has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Accounta--who?

2007-05-29T10:45:00.000-05:00

I guess the comment I made yesterday about accountability might've seemed like it came out of left field. I don't know if corporate America worries about such things, but assessment and accountability have become big buzzwords in academe. Simply put, it means: Are we doing what we set out to do? And more importantly, how can we prove to the legislature and accrediting bodies that we're doing what we're supposed to?

There are so many shameful scams targeting writers out there, I sometimes worry that people look askance at Brian's contests and think, 'Where's the catch?"

You have every right to be skeptical. Heaven knows there seems to be no end to the people out there devising ways to get into aspiring writers' pocketbooks and wallets. Every time someone asks you for a contest entry fee, conference registration fee, workshop tuition, reading/editing/book doctoring fee, or to buy their how-to-be-a-writer book, magazine, or DVD, you have to question whether the cost is justified. And in cases like this that might seem too good to be true, it's healthy to look for the catch.

I see this blog as a chance for a kind of site visit where we let outsiders examine our processes and we show that everything is in order. I hope to present you with evidence and information to put your mind at ease. So stay tuned...

Raison d'etre

2007-05-28T09:46:00.000-05:00

It’s been just over two years since Brian came up with the idea of the InnermoonLit contests, and as I recently sat reading entries for the second annual Best First Chapter of a Novel Contest, I couldn’t help feeling like something was missing. Behind each entry is someone reaching out, sharing some piece of themselves, and for the most part, we never get to make contact with those outstretched hands.

We communicate with the winners, of course, and we get to find out who's behind our very favorite entries, but the rest of our entrants remain as mysterious to us as we probably seem to them. They may read the contest results on Brian’s website but never hear directly from us. We used to send emails confirming the receipt of entries but soon became overwhelmed and trusted that the website’s automatic confirmation page would suffice to quell writers’ worries and assure them their work hadn’t gotten stuck in cyberspace. (Judging by the number of multiple entries we get, usually sent two or three minutes apart, it doesn’t always work.) Sometimes Brian gets emails from entrants who seem to think this contest is run by a faceless computer or possibly a vast board of trustees.

So I had this urge to humanize the InnermoonLit contests—to let you peek behind the scenes a bit. I’ll admit, part of me wants people to recognize what Brian puts into this venture. He throws his considerable diligence and discipline into judging the contests, and the prizes and administrative costs come out of his pocket (and as you know, there are no entry fees). Then too, I have this accountability compulsion, probably from working for so many years as a staff person in higher education. I plan to lay bare our working methods so that you can see how we operate and possibly even provide suggestions for improvement.

So just remember, we are a mom-&-pop type outfit here. In a way, we are high tech…but just slightly so. When you email us, you’re not subscribing to some computerized mailing list or addressing a board of directors.

It’s just us, a couple of nice people who love writing and want to reach out to other writers, to give them a little pat on the back, a virtual high five, to maybe help keep them keeping on when the work gets tough and the outlook is bleak.