You’ve probably already heart of it, but if you haven’t let me explain. Crowdsourcing is the latest buzzword in the funding of creative pursuits. Websites such as Kickstarter and WeFund offer artists a means of getting, typically, many small donations that can add up to substantial amounts to help fund their creative visions. The most lucrative example of this was an industrial designer who raised almost a $1 million pushing a project to develop ipod nanos into wearable wristwatches.

For a writer who’s short fiction sales barely cover the cost of the monthly gas bill, crowdsourcing could well be a critical tool in his or her future success–especially the creation of a novel length work, which usually requires months, if not years, of unpaid labour before they can begin to hope for any kind of return. As a matter of fact, most writers I know, even the ones publishing novels with respectable imprints, still work full-time. This is all well and good–nobody should be given a free lunch–but I do wonder how this economic bottleneck distorts and stifles talent. Crowdsourcing, with its upfront funding model, is a very exciting development indeed.

From the pitches I’ve read on the above sites, it seems that projects run by passionate, articulate individuals with publically-beneficial outcomes and existing track-records  (e.g. rapper Baba Brinkman who had success at the Edinburgh festival and successfully funded an Evolution Rap series to help raise awareness of science) have the best chance of success. For a writer who hopes to fund a first novel–a most self-indulgent pastime with difficult-to-quantify public benefit–this presents quite a challenge.

How would you spark partipation in such a funding endeavour beyond your friends and acquaintances?

Spent a relaxed morning catching up on the Hugo Voting, followed by reading a couple of novellas.

First, was my WOTF classmate Stephen Kotowych’s “Under the Shield”, which is this month’s cover story at Intergalactic Medicine Show. In an alternative history, where Tesla has beaten Edison and AC trumps DC, FBI agent Peter Trevelyan investigates a brutal gassing on the New York subway against a backdrop of super-weapons and cold war. Great stuff.

Second, curious as to the Novella category winner from the Hugo Awards–since my friend Aliette de Bodard didn’t win!–I tracked down Allen Steele’s “The Emperor of Mars”. It’s a quiet story about Mars, madness, and survival, and I enjoyed it greatly. I won’t spoil it, but I can see why it did so well at the Hugos. A story for the fans.

You’ve heard of “Top of the Pops”, England’s long-running chart music show, well this is “Top of the Zines”, my attempt at ranking the short speculative fiction markets according to where I would most like to be published. Of course, this list is highly personal, and it would be great to hear where opinions diverge. The rough criteria that enter into my equation comprise three main strands. Prestige, readership, and payment. Since short genre fiction largely caps off at 5 cents/word, payment is probably the least important factor in my eyes, although if I’ve spent months on a twenty-thousand word masterpiece the word rate takes on a little more relevance. Of the other two factors, until you have a published novel to shift, prestige is probably going to trump readership–that’s certainly the case when I considered this list. So, cheesy graphics and music at the ready, here’s my top-ten:

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Well, not unexpectedly, the novel’s proving more difficult than I dreamily imagined. I like to put this down to my incredibly high standards, but the reality is a mixture of fear, laziness, and an overzealous inner critiquer. Part of the problem is coming up with a wide-angle framing narrative that will make sense in the context of the novel’s big sensawunda device. Without getting into the details, what needs to happen is pretty far-fetched, but I’m determined to treat it in a rational, hard-SF way. And until I have that down satisfactorily it feels very hard to begin. The good news is I think I have something that could work.

In other news, on the acceptances front, 2010 is shaping up to be my most succesful year to date. Platform 17, my near-future gritty cyberpunk piece set in a dark, fragmented Budapest, has just gone live at Futurismic. In addition, barring Acts of God, I will be appearing in Permuted Press’ Times of Trouble anthology, and Whitlock Publishing’s Our Haunted World collection. Selling these relatively old stories that are a bit like rough diamonds with more of the rough than the diamond is very gratifying. They may not be great literary pieces, but they have a lot of heart, and I’m glad they won’t be languishing in my bottom drawer. (Actually, they probably will, given that’s where my published work ends up anyhow). Combining these successes with sales to Clarkesworld, Nature, and Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and Music for Another World Antho, and this year I’ve pretty much doubled my published fiction.

Plus, in less than a month, Jeff Spock will be presenting me with my contractual two-copies of the real-time strategy game, R.U.S.E. that I worked on last year. At long last the scriptwriter vocation on my business cards will actually have meaning in the real world!

There’s a real paradox at the heart of storytelling. On the one hand, a story is a messy gestalt, a Platonic ideal that has its most meaningful manifestation in the mind of the author. In this form the story is whole, indivisible, timeless, beyond language. Call this the writer’s story. On the other hand, a story is nothing more than a linear string of words. In this form a story is atomic, divisible, temporal, linguistic. Call this the written story.

The skill of the writer, or rather, one of the fundamental skills of the writer, is to render the writer’s story into the written story such that when a reader engages with that text, the writer’s story is recreated in the mind of the reader. Of course, every reader will create a different read story according to their experiences, beliefs etc. but provided there’s enough common mental ground between writer and reader the writer’s story and the reader’s story should be recognisably similiar.

Now, common wisdom states that the story is the text–that there is no distinction between story and writing. From the reader’s perspective this is a cast-iron truth; they can only approach the story through the text. If the text is cliched, illiterate etc then, no matter how good the story in the writer’s original conception, the story the reader discovers will be cliched, fractured etc too. However, from the writer’s perspective, there are an infinite number of ways that the story they carry in their minds can be rendered onto the page. The dimensions along which the text can vary with respect to the story include, but are not limited to, specificity, sentence length, word choice, immersion, and pace.

One of the ways a writer improves (and this is certainly true for myself) is by getting more skilled at rendering the story into a more pleasing textual form. Less is more is a good guide in this regard. As beginning writers we tend to forget how good a device the human mind is for colouring in grey areas. With regard to setting, what the mind thirsts for is the telling detail, the unsual attractors that encompass the whole scene. For example, the word “station” automatically connotes the ideas of trains, commuters, travel, tickets, barriers. Instead of spending words on these things that the reader implicitly knows, better to concentrate on the elements that differentiate the setting from its stereotypical form e.g. “scuff-marked riot placards littered the station concourse”. With regard to character, the mind wants the outlying but still realistic thoughts and/or lines which help delimit a person. This means bearing witness to our characters when they are under duress, not when they are their normal, everyday selves–unless we want to draw a counterpoint, but even then, it’s best to include some kind of flavouring. And as to filler language . . . cut!

Some writer guy once said that you need to write a million words to get the knack of writing a good story. He was probably a SF writer with a penchant for long-winded explanatory passages–thus quickly building his word count–but the spirit of the dictat remains true, I think. Iain Banks quips about his stellar rise to fame after the publication of “The Wasp Factory”: In the end all it took was a million words, six novels and fourteen years, and there I was, an overnight success.

Well, I think I’m a quarter of the way there by my very rough reckoning–fifty stories/half-stories/fragments each of 5000 words on average–and that’s a scary thought. If I continue at this pace I will be 136 by the time I complete my million words . . . aka dead, or uploaded etc. Hopefully, I’m not on the million-words writers track, but the super-secret 256,000 words track. Anyway, the take home message is simple: writers–between the social life, the earn-enough-to-eat-not-live-in-a-dumpster life, the research life, the let’s-do-anything-but-write life–write. Non-writers don’t. And, generally, unless you’ve got that gene on the 17th chromosome that makes rays of sunshine goldust oh sod it, literary fire, spill from your cursor, the more you write the better you’ll get (where “write” encompasses all of the corollary activites of critical analysis, self-reflection, and getting round to reading Strunk and White etc).

News: Recently had a revelation that brought together my disparate novel ideas into a coherent whole. I will be attacking the research with gusto shortly. Very excited.

Scape, an e-zine for YA fiction that lauches in 2011, have accepted “The Terrarium” for publication. I’m thrilled because the story (a) had me mining my school days for authentic touches (b) was first-drafted in Budapest in 2006 and discussed in a smoke-filled bar with a Dr. Who writer, and (c) has slowly accreted into a quality piece of work over the intervening years.

“Thargus and Brian” is now out at Escape Pod. It was the last story I wrote at Clarion, and I have to confess I was always slightly ashamed of its stoner humour and lack of seriousness. Listening to it today, I actually like it a great deal.

Serendipitous moment: after printing, paper-clipping, SASE enveloping, cover-lettering, and generally doing tasks that were not unheard of in the 18th century, I strolled to my local post office with my fat manuscript “Brood”, waited in line for a small ice age, only to be told that IRCs, those magical slips of paper that allow my national postal service to talk to your national postal service and look pretty but are a pain in the arse, could only be purchased at the main PO. Coming home and sulking in front of the Asimov’s homepage, I railed against the inequities of the modern world, clicked refresh, and found myself gaping with amazement at an Electronic Submission Form. I must’ve been the first submitter. The rejection came back in a record eighteen days.

Over at the Odyssey Workshop blog, there’s recently been an interesting discussion on writer’s block.

This is a subject close to my heart, because I’ve increasingly been feeling “blocked” when it comes to getting the words out. My own particular strain manifests itself as a horrible paralysing sensation that often prevents me producing a single line when I sit down to write. It seems to originate from a heightened awareness of what constitiutes “bad writing”, and a strong desire not to ever create anything mediocre. It sucks.

It’s like a constant mental chatter, challenging every single choice I make. Why this word? What is the character really feeling? How does this advance the story? And it seems to be worst when it comes to creating the openings of stories–even though this is often the part of the piece that gets chopped first! Looking at older work that I produced without paralysis, and seeing its faults only makes me less confident in throwing down new words now. Anyway, I’m feeling blocked even finding the words to talk about this so I’m moving on to something else.

On a positive note Escape Pod have purchased my humourous piece, “Thargus and Brian”. I wrote this partly as a challenge to broaden my style, and partly because I was near-exhausted at the time–it was my final week story for Clarion in 2006. It languished in bottom-drawer shame, until I decided what-the-hell and submitted it without revision to Escape Pod. Surprisingly, they bought it.