AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Erika Holt

Note from Nayad: The series continues. This week I'll post interviews with authors contributing to my speculative fiction anthology, WHAT FATES IMPOSE: Tales of Divination. If you want to read twisty tales about struggles with destiny, this anthology is for you. I hope you enjoy these author interviews!

As of this posting we have only 30 more hours to go on the Kickstarter Fundraising Campaign for WHAT FATES IMPOSE, and WE ARE FULLY FUNDED. Yay! We're up to $5,185 from 217 Beloved Backers!

You can still pre-order the book and get awesome rewards until 8pm Central on Sunday, July 14th. All extra help we get will go toward the finishing details for the book and making more books like it possible, because we want to keep on creating anthologies and paying authors the pro rates they deserve.

You can easily tell your friends about the project by using this page to give us three clicks.

Erika Holt lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she writes and edits speculative fiction.  Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight Issue 6, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales.  She is also co-editor of two anthologies from EDGE and Absolute XPress: Rigor Amortis and  Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s, and assistant editor of Nightmare Magazine. I can give you my personal guarantee that she's fun to drink with!

Erika's story in WHAT FATES IMPOSE: Tales of Divination is called "Murder of Crows," and it's a chilling tale about the nature of trust, belief, and terrible choices.

Now here's Erika to tell you about her methods of developing stories, some of her favorite writing themes, and her thoughts on divination. *all the crows in the world startle into flight*

7 Ways to Improve as a Writer

PREMISE: Every writer can get better at writing.

QUESTION: How?

The standard advice you hear about how to get better at writing is to write more, finish your projects, and submit your work. You're told to write either a certain number of words or for a certain amount of time every day, ideally at the same time of day, and after a while this is supposed to magically make your writing better.

The trouble with that, I think, is that it leads to people just churning out words at the same level of quality—the level where they started. Any improvement is slow. The advice to finish projects is the best part of it. Learning to finish one story and start another one is important. Submitting them is also important, but personal rejections are rare; getting a bunch of form rejections doesn't tell you anything about what you need to improve.

Things You Might Like to Read While I'm Away from the Keyboard

This evening I'm leaving town to go to Mo*Con in Indianapolis, where I expect I will have a fabulous time or get arrested trying. Disclaimer: I have actually never gotten arrested, so I'm not sure I understand the process. But you never know. You never do know.

After the weekend, I'm moving onward for a vacation next week. Since I'm not taking a computer, I don't expect to be posting in this here blog during that time, so I'm going to leave you with some links to read. BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT YOUR NEEDS. I'll have my phone, which means I'll be showing up on Twitter and Facebook. But here are those links!

My two most popular blog posts:

Five Things I've Learned from Reading Slush (July 11, 2011), from back in my days of reading submissions for Clarkesworld Magazine (which, by the way, has a new, free, excellent-looking issue posted for May, so in my opinion you won't be sorry if you click).

Five Great Books for New-ish Writers (July 18, 2011), all of which I still recommend, but this reminds me: Coming Soon: Five Books for Leveling Up in Writing and Life.

Other blogs I recommend:

Start here for a list of blog posts exploring depression and creativity, written by people who will be at Mo*Con. Links to the rest are at the bottom of the post. This year's theme is The Mind and Spirit of the Artist.

Inkpunks, where a bunch of fantastic writers I know post consistently thoughtful and helpful posts about writing. I'm never disappointed when I visit this blog.

Penelope Trunk's Career Blog, where Penelope expresses a huge personality with interesting things to say, bringing in stories from her personal life to illustrate her widely respected ideas about career development. Many people disagree with her conclusions, but she offers a lot to think about. I don't know her, but my cousin does! If you want to see what she's like, here's a post that includes a demo reel from when some people wanted to make a reality show about her life.

Booktrust, where author Matt Haig is the writer-in-residence. He has a blog on his own website, too.

Ferrett Steinmetz's blog, in which he writes about writing, gaming, polyamory, beekeeping, politics, and all sorts of other things. I am solidly on Team Ferrett.

That should give you plenty to choose from! I hope you have a great week. If all goes as planned, I'll be back to blogging in mid-May, which is not terribly far in the future.

How Being Social Helps Me as a Writer and Editor

Okay, first: TO BE A WRITER, ONE MUST WRITE.

To which I will add: TO IMPROVE AS A WRITER, ONE MUST LEARN AND PRACTICE.

However! There's a social element that has been helping to get my work published, and it's gotten me a job as an anthology editor, and I'm going to talk about that.

In a widely used and respected personality test (free to take here), I come out as an ENFJ (Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging), which clearly affects the way that I work. I'm not even the biggest extravert in the world, especially not relative to the general pool of Americans, but relative to groups of mostly-introverted writers, I end up looking super-social. This explains the number of people I'm connected with on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I just love 'em. Bring on the people!

This might seem a little frivolous, but consider what it's brought me:

I was invited to submit a story for an anthology, when I had never been published before, on the basis of a five-minute conversation that wasn't even about writing, because I introduced myself to an author on a convention panel and complimented the awesome title of his book, and gave him my card. He put me on an invitation list. I wrote and submitted a story, and it became my first published story.

I was asked to write a book review for a magazine, which was later published in that magazine, because I spent four hours working at a convention party (and I also received an awesome t-shirt for that).

I became a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine partially because of a recommendation from an editor I had met at a convention, and the slush reading experience improved me as a writer and also gave me the experience to become a short-story editor.

I have evaluated a novel manuscript for an agent I know in the UK, because of work that I did for him on a book he was writing when I met him, which was before he even became an agent.

I was asked to contribute an interview for Writers Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy during a ten-minute conversation at a convention, which led me to interview my favorite author, Tim Powers (who, by the way, I had already met at a convention).

I've been invited to submit stories for six other anthologies as a result of meeting editors and a publisher at conventions, and three of those were accepted for the books. One of the ones that wasn't accepted for its anthology went on to make me a semi-finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest. I would not have written any of these stories, or my first published one, without the guidelines given to me for the anthologies.

Knowing that publisher I met made it easy to apply knowledge gained from an editor I had met, and turn my anthology proposal into a real project. All of the authors who have submitted stories for What Fates Impose are people I've met, or I've interacted with online, or have been recommended to me by people I've met.

Okay? So in every case listed above, I actually did the work. I wrote the stories and the review, set up and conducted the interview, read the slush, and volunteered my time and effort to help people in a variety of ways. But none of those opportunities would have been there for me if I hadn't shown up at conventions, introduced myself to people, genuinely liked those people, and continued to pay attention to what they were doing online even when I couldn't see them in person. I was doing these things before anything of mine was published, and I'll continue to do them because I would definitely do the same things just for fun, even if I didn't expect to get anything else back from it at all. But the honest truth is that I have the start of a career because of being friendly and interested in people.

Coming soon: How I Learned to Be Social Despite Having Introverted Parents

How Choosing Anthology Stories Is, and Is Not, Like Making a Mix Tape

The idea for this post came from the awesome Ferrett Steinmetz, who told me he thought choosing stories for an anthology was like making a mix tape. So here's what I think of that.

There are different kinds of anthologies. Reprint anthologies are made up of stories that have been published before in other places. The editor picks a theme and chooses stories to fit that theme. Making a reprint anthology is very much like making a mix tape. When I make a mix tape, I'm usually making it for someone else, to combine songs I like in a way that I hope they'll enjoy, that might create a different effect from listening to the songs as part of their albums of origin. I might include more obscure songs so that I can be a showoff about the range of my musical interests, while bringing some more popular songs to keep the mix accessible. Likewise, with a reprint anthology you look at stories that have already been chosen for publication in various places, and evaluate how well they would fit into the effect you're trying to achieve. You can select from a huge range of stories, published over a long period of time, and this gives you the opportunity to use stories written by Big Names with Big Followings, although many people will have already read at least some of those.

Then you have original anthologies, for which writers are asked to submit previously-unpublished stories to fit a theme, and that means they may be writing new stories specifically in the hope of having work published in that anthology. This process is a little bit like making a mix tape, but it's a lot more like commissioning musicians to write songs for a new album. It's about bringing something new into the world. There's collaboration involved. The editor needs to be able to write effective guidelines that will get writers to understand what kind of stories she wants, and for that to happen, she needs to have a clear idea of what she wants in the first place.

Deciding who to ask to submit a story is complicated. Do you ask everybody, making it an open call for submissions and posting about it all over the place, to bring in lots of potential material and maybe some surprising gems in the form of a huge slush pile to read through? Or do you think about which writers are already doing the kind of work you like, and invite a select list? Because that way you minimize the work and maximize the likelihood of getting the kind of stories you want, but you don't give anyone new any opportunities and you don't get major surprises. It's in your best interest to ask some well-known authors to submit stories, but they're the ones most likely to be busy or to not need to be in your little anthology because their collection of every story they ever wrote is coming out next month. But if you're paying attention, maybe you can interest some emerging writers who have been steadily writing new, awesome work and getting new, awesome fans eager to see what they'll write next.

Once the submissions come in, the editor needs to be able to evaluate them on an individual basis for: 1) how well they suit the anthology's theme, 2) how well they work as stories, and 3) if they're not quite right in either of the above areas, whether or not they can be edited into becoming right, and whether or not the amount of editing necessary will be worth the effort. It's possible that a story that doesn't work for this anthology might be perfect for another one, or might sell somewhere else without much editing.

There are decisions to be made about how well the stories will work together. Maybe some of them are too similar to each other. Maybe one is great, but so different from the others that it wouldn't make sense to keep it. Then there's the order of the stories to decide. Given the way they all go together, which one is the strongest candidate to go first? Which one will be best to finish off the book and leave the final impression? (These are considerations in a reprint anthology, too).

Another way is to combine both types and create a book with some original stories and some reprints. This may be the strongest option if you prefer the original type, combining the unknowns of novelty with the flexibility to fill gaps with known authors' work. If you don't receive enough of the kind of stories you were hoping for, you can go shopping in the store of magazines, collections, and other anthologies to find already-polished stories that have been tested and reviewed. Or if you're starting from the reprint plan, you might want to tempt readers with a few stories that have never appeared anywhere else.

In conclusion, what I'm doing with What Fates Impose--an original anthology of fantasy stories about divination, which may include a few reprints--is bigger and messier than making a mix tape, but it gives me the chance to contribute more and make more decisions than a reprint anthology would, and I love it.

Five Things I've Learned from Reading Slush

As of this morning, I've read 3,357 story submissions for Clarkesworld Magazine. It's not a nice, round, significant number, but it's a big one. I started to build up that number on September 20, 2008. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the slush. Or, um, something quite the opposite of "glory." In most cases.

Because I am here for you, I'm going to share five things I've learned from reading the slush pile. I'm not going to stop at just telling you, either. I take these things so seriously that I'm going to apply them to MY OWN SELF.

1. I want you to succeed. I can't speak for all slush readers, but I think many of them feel the same way. I write blogs like this one because I hope to help you get published. I admire you when you keep trying. I remember the stories that didn't quite work out, but had a lot of potential. When that happens, I look forward to reading the next story that writer sends in. The next four items in this list are all about how to make the next one better.

2. Remove the backstory. Unless there's NO CHANCE of the reader understanding without some background, really, really don't keep all of that backstory at the beginning of your story. Ideally, it should be shown in small doses later, if at all. Those first three to five pages of not much happening are often the only pages that get read when a story is in the slush pile. A story doesn't have to start with explosions, but it should draw the reader in, and make her curious. A big lecture at the beginning pushes the reader out. My top reason for rejecting stories is: "The story begins too slowly."

3. Let the ending be complete. Abrupt endings are unsatisfying. By "abrupt," I mean that things are happening, characters are acting, and then they suddenly stop, and it's over. The story doesn't give any sense of what has changed for the character, or any suggestion of how things might go on from this point. Why did the character just do all of those things she did in the story? Did she get what she wanted? Or did the result of her efforts turn out to be disappointing? Even an open-ended story should give the reader some clues; there should be things to ponder, different opinions to form about what just happened and how it might affect the character. If a slush story has been good enough for me to read all the way to the end, an abrupt ending can be anywhere from frustrating to heartbreaking.

4. There's a connection between the beginning and the ending. What you're doing in a story is taking a character in one state, at the beginning, through the steps necessary to reach another state, at the ending. Think about a news story, with its ideal explanation of who, what, when, where, and why. I'm going to put them in a different order. Who is this character, and when and where is she located? What does this character want? Why does she want it? Who and/or what is stopping her from getting it at first, and what does she do to get it? And then there are two important additions: Does she get it? Whether she does or she doesn't, how does she feel about that? It doesn't matter what structure you use to answer those questions, but those are the things a curious reader would like to know. If you want to be really thorough, think about this, too: Who is telling the story, why is she telling it, and when is she telling it? That could help with your point of view choice.

5. A person who has read thousands of story submissions doesn't have any patience left. I'm very sorry, but it's true. I get fidgety. I've read the beginning of so many stories, and I've seen so many of the common ideas that come through, and I've been so disappointed by stories that started well but ended badly. You might not believe the enthusiasm I feel when a story shows me something new, something expressed beautifully, with ideas thought through so that I don't get distracted by implausibility. I LOVE an excellent short story. I have low tolerance for a mediocre one. If you're dedicated to writing and publishing short stories, please read the best ones you can regularly, and study them. Know what effect you're trying to achieve with your story, and do your best to achieve it. Don't try to polish the same story forever; do your best with it and send it out, and then write another one. But continue to read and learn as you go on.