quantum story fixes

[prusik]

"Running and Falling" hit the top of the Critters queue this past Wednesday. So far, it's been a much more pleasant experience than the last time I submitted a story to Critters. The last time, I got lots of crits, most of them from people who either accused me of mental illness or told me that I should quit writing because no one would ever buy SF with gay content. (WTF?)

(I should point out, BTW, that "gay content" makes the story sound much more explicit than the story actually is. Of the story's many problems, that two guys fall in love and *gasp* kiss, is not one of them. This was the story I submitted to the Scalzi-edited "Big Honkin' SF Cliche" issue of Subterranean. John Scalzi correctly rejected it. At some point, I need to re-write it at some point. I like the first 500-1000 words a lot. The other 4000, not so much.)

This time, I've gotten only two crits so far, but no personal attacks, and both crits have been useful, if not necessarily in the way the critiquers had intended. I'm starting to think that submitting a work makes me see all the flaws in the work. The weird result is getting a crit which tells me about the problems I fixed the previous day. This is not a bad thing. It just means that I need the courage of my convictions to realize that I can see what the problems in my own work are and fix them before I submit, not after. (I don't really think I can go, "Um, Mr. Schmidt, can you please ignore my previous draft? This one is much better.")

Also, I've realized that what I need to do is have someone say certain stock phrases to me everytime I think I have finished a story. e.g., "Don't you think the opening is too slow?" "I was confused about where this story takes place." They don't have to be true. Saying them to me makes me figure out whether or not they are, and if they are, how to fix it. (Presumably, this still works if I tell myself. Maybe I can just imagine tnh saying these things to me?)

One more odd thing which works well for me: the text-to-speech converter. I know I've read this somewhere so I'm not the only person to do this. I have this tendency to drop words when I write. I can pick up that error, and other errors, much more easily when I hear text than when I read text. Using the text-to-speech converter to speak my story to me makes proofreading much easier.

I've tried all of these things with my ex-VP Reunion story. I'm going to give it one more pass, get it into standard document format, then mail it off to the VPX mailbox to see what people think. So if any of you have a free moment, I would appreciate a crit.

Comments

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Hah! A couple weeks ago I was digging around to try and find a good text-to-speech converter for exactly that purpose. I ended up just using the most available one (IE: me), but I have to think that it would be double-plus useful to hear the way a computer thinks it'd be spoken. Is there any particular software you're using for it?

Also: SF with gay content is unsaleable? That's not a crit. That's a psychotic break.

[prusik.livejournal.com]

OS X comes with a text-to-speech converter. (Steve Eley uses it in the opening to Escape Pod.) So I've been using that. I read my work aloud to make sure I get the dialogue voice right. But it's hard for me to proofread that way because I end up speaking what I think I wrote instead. I do get good results if I speak the text backwards. (i.e., from end to beginning.) But that's extremely tedious and time-consuming.

The text-to-speech converter is the best solution I've come up with so far.

SF with gay content is unsaleable? That's not a crit. That's a psychotic break.

Yeah, I had to decide that I would ignore those crits. Like I said, this time around, the Critters experience has been much better.