Arbeitswert: The Value of Work

I've been thinking about why I chose to write speculative fiction out of all the available genres out there.  Ultimately, I think it has more to do with my childhood obsession with science fiction than anything else, but I've come up with another rationale.  I think speculative fiction gives the writer a unique opportunity to get people to look at the world from a different perspective than they would otherwise.  So the hard part is just figuring out what perspective you want your readers to see.

You could argue that a story doesn't need to have anything beyond "likeable protagonists undergoing engaging conflicts," but I think writers of such stories are missing an opportunity.  Why bother writing about an alternate reality if it doesn't make readers look at their own reality differently?  I think sometimes authors get so hung up on "world building" that they forget to give a purpose to the alterations they make, like the speculative elements are only there to remind us that oh yeah, this story takes place in another world.

Anyway, the point of it all is that as I've thought about what kinds of themes I would want to pursue in my writing, one thing that keeps standing out to me is the value of work.  Not the value of the products of work, but the value of the work itself.  It's something that I think is hugely important, but that I don't think gets as much attention or appreciation as it should.  I wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo last year, and it, being my first attempt at writing, was of course terrible.  Though it did allow me to get that "first" novel over with, and though I did learn a lot about writing, I think there is a lot of value in just the writing of the novel itself.  Even without the written product that resulted, just the act of creating something from nothing is pretty cool, and it's worth something beyond whatever dollar figure anyone could attach to it.

It's something I've had a hard time articulating, which I suppose is part of why it occupies my mind so much.  There's not even a good English word for it, as far as I've been able to find.  The closest I've been able to come up with is a German word: Arbeitswert, which translates literally to "work value" (not to be confused with the Marxian economic principle).  This is something that I hope to write more about in the future, so I'll be using the Arbeitswert tag when I do.  Hopefully I'll be able to find ways to explain it without having to resort to more German....

BuzzyMag Now a SFWA Pro Market

It looks like there's a new addition to the SFWA Pro Markets list.  BuzzyMag has met the criteria to become an SFWA qualifying market, and correspondingly will be included in my MarketWants analysis.  Which I will get around to any day now....

Kindle Edition of Mad Scientist Journal Summer 2013 Is ALIVE

So...pretty cool.

NEWS: It's...Alive....

My first published short story went live today, and I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.  Mad Scientist Journal did a phenomenal job; I even like the artwork. :)

In other news, another market has dropped from the list of those meeting my criteria for evaluation.  Brutarian will no longer be included in my MarketWants analysis.  But I'll write more about that another day, after I take a little more time to relish in my first victory....

Preliminary Pro Markets Summary and Exclusions

So, after a somewhat cursory evaluation of the SFWA pro markets, a few immediately dropped from my list of prospective publishers.  These markets of course have their own bases of support, so other writers will naturally want to look at these markets and see if they meet their needs, but for me personally, I can't imagine myself ever submitting to them.  This is mostly due to restrictions they add to their submissions requirements, and I would imagine that most writers of short fiction would feel the same way.

Dragon seems more geared toward players of Dungeons & Dragons-type role-playing games, which I am just not really interested in and wouldn't really know how to write for.  Rather than just writing a story and submitting it, you have to submit a pitch first, which is a downside for me.  I'd rather write what I want and then find a home for it, rather than trying to tailor my writing to a single market.  It fails to meet L. Ron Hubbard's 5 market rule.

Grantville Gazette is similar, recommending you submit a short sketch first and see if they're even interested.  If they're not, you're just out of luck, even if you've written a great story.  You're also restricted to writing within their specific universe, which again, just doesn't appeal to me.

Odyssey requires a query first, Subterranean Magazine doesn't accept unsolicited submissions, and ChiZine, The Pedestal Magazine, and Redstone Science Fiction appear to be on temporary or permanent hiatus.  Cemetery Dance may have potential, but they don't have a "What We're Looking For" section posted on their website, so I won't be considering them in my analysis.

Writers of the Future has a lot of potential as a market for a good story, and David Farland has written quite a bit about what attributes the judges of the contest are looking for, but since his recommendations are overly broad and not posted on the WotF site itself, I'm excluding this market as well, at least for the purposes of this particular analysis.

That leaves a remainder of 22 markets which accept general submissions and have posted guidelines for what kinds of stories they're looking for.  I'll post some of the preliminary results of what these markets want next time....

What Do Pro Science Fiction Markets Want?

I was reading David Farland's Kick in the Pants a couple of weeks ago and he recommended reading L. Ron Hubbard's "The Manuscript Factory."  I found a version online, and I have to say I really enjoyed it.  I guess I just like the nuts and bolts approach to success as a science fiction writer much more than the artsy take so many seem to restrict it to (and are in turn restricted by).

In any case, one of Hubbard's recommendations was that your stories always have at least 5 markets they would appeal to.  So how do you accomplish that?  One way would be to just assume that any of the markets on the SFWA pro list would be a potential market for whatever speculative fiction you happen to write, but I've found myself having a hard time drilling down to which market on the list would be the best fit for a particular story.  It's not a long list, but every market has its own emphases/flavors, and many of them spell out exactly what they're looking for on their submissions pages.

So with that in mind, I've decided to start  a short series of entries tagged MarketWants where I'll just break down the markets by what kinds of stories or what elements in the stories the markets say they want.  It won't be based on any "insider knowledge" or anything, just what the markets openly profess on their websites that they are looking for.  This is mostly just to help me personally to better focus my stories on the areas that are most marketable, but hopefully others will find the information useful as well.

I of course am curious to see what story attributes end up at the top of the list.

Am I Competing Against Other Writers?

I keep reading postings on authors’ websites (for example, here) about how writers aren’t competing with each other, if someone else sells a book, it doesn’t mean I won’t sell mine, we’re all in this together, blah blah blah…. 

 

It’s not that it’s annoying me (per se), it’s just that the idea seems so prevalent (a quick Google search yielded here, here, and here, for example) and yet is so mathematically unfounded…at least in my (I believe justified) opinion.

So some quick math (yay):

A writer’s probability Pof getting published comes down to two variables (ignoring the option of self-publication for the moment): the number of opportunities for publication, X, and the number of writers trying to snag one of those opportunities, Y.  The probability is a fraction, P = X/Y.  Pretty straightforward.

Introductory calculus tells us that if we hold X constant (meaning we have a fixed number of opportunities for publication), then as Y gets larger (meaning there are more and more writers trying to get published), the limit as Y goes to infinity is zero.  In other words, the more writers trying to nab one of those publication slots, the less likely it is for any of them to get one.  Conversely, in this scenario, fewer writers trying to get published would increase the probability of publication for any given writer.

Similarly, if we hold Yconstant (a fixed number of writers), then as X gets smaller (meaning more and more publication opportunities are being taken by other writers), the limit as Xgoes to zero is zero.  In other words, the more writers get published, the less likely it is for any of the other writers to get published.  Conversely, fewer writers taking up publication slots increases (temporarily) the likelihood that any given writer will get published.

Now this probably isn’t applicable for authors who are already published (like in Scalzi’s case, where he’s talking about book sales, since he and Dan Brown are already published), where there are other market forces at play, but for the majority of aspiring writers, there are only so many publishing opportunities to go around.

Using the SFWA list of professional publications, I figure there are about 1,000 opportunities to have a short story published per year, accounting for professional magazines that publish a set number of stories daily, weekly, quarterly, etc.  Whatever the actual number is, it’s a fixed number.  The number of writers trying for those slots is roughly fixed as well, though I have no idea what it is.  I do know that one magazine I’ve submitted to a few times always has about 60 stories in the queue, so figure about 60 submissions per day for every magazine, which gives very roughly about 500,000 submissions to pro magazines per year.  Again, whatever the actual number is, it’s fixed.

The more writers there are “competing,” the lower the probability of success.  The more writers achieve success, the lower the probability that anyone else will have it.  At least in this context -- though I would expect it to extend beyond professional short story publications to other mediums as well.

Assuming for a minute that these numbers are correct, an author trying to get published this year could expect a probability of about 0.002, or 1 in 500.  Not terrible, but it means the average writer could expect to have about 500 rejections before getting published.  Naturally, there’s a lot of variation between authors, and many (most likely the successful ones who write about how we’re not competing with each other…) will publish much sooner than that.  And they probably have strong anecdotal evidence that says it doesn't matter, that they're not competing with anyone else.  After all, they got published, and no one else's success impeded them one bit.  Right?  But then there are the many writers on the other side of the curve, who will take much longer than 500 submissions -- or at least they would if they didn’t give up long before getting that far, which is what I imagine happens to most.  There are obviously major differences in writing ability between authors, and I like to think that it’s the better ones who get those limited few publication slots.  But what if, hypothetically speaking, every writer was at the exact same skill level?  There’d still be only 1,000 slots available. 

It’s a numbers game.

Nothing against self-publication, and certainly nothing against celebrating other writers’ achievements and trying not to have a cutthroat capitalistic perspective on it all, but don’t lie to yourself!  I can see why it’s not necessarily intuitive.  It doesn’t seem fair.  But the numbers is what they is.

First Six Months Statistics

Alright, so it's been over six months now since I wrote my first short story, and it seems like a good time to look back and see what the first six months as a writer looks like (for me, anyway).  This is of course going to look very different from some writers' beginning experience (most of my stories so far have been short flash fiction types of stories), but I think it will probably look very similar to what many others have/will experience(d), so here it is:

From November 2012 through April 2013, I wrote 15 short stories, and I submitted those stories 22 times (total) to 10 different magazines that publish science fiction (6 times to Daily Science Fiction, 5 times to Flash Fiction Online, 3 times to Clarkesworld, 2 times to 100 Word Stories, and once each to 365 Tomorrows, EscapePod, Every Day Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Mad Scientist Journal, and Strange Horizons).

Of these 22 submissions, 16 got form letter rejections, 2 got rejections with comments (Every Day Fiction and Lightspeed Magazine), 2 got rejected at the final stage (Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online), one got accepted (Mad Scientist Journal), and one never got a response (365 Tomorrows).  Average response time for these submissions (excluding the one with no response) was 21 days.

So yeah, a lot of rejection, but I definitely feel like I've made progress over the past few months.  The two that made it to the final round at professional publications especially make me feel like I'm getting better/closer.  So I'm going to go ahead and predict that the next 6 months will see a few more acceptances...but I guess we'll find out in November.

How Long Does It Take to Get Published?

I’ve been looking at my submission stats so far and wanted something to compare them to, so I dug around a little and came up with the experiences of these three science fiction authors (this is just based on a cursory look at their blogs--I may have understood some of the numbers incorrectly):

John Scalzi (soon-to-be-former SFWA President, 9 novels and some novellas, short stories, etc.): Started writing science fiction at age 28, contract signed for debut novel at 33, debut novel published at 35, won John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at age 37 (see full timeline here).

Jamie Todd Reuben (8 short stories): Decided to become a professional science fiction writer at age 21, first story accepted for publication at age 34, second professional story accepted at age 37, third professional story accepted at age 38.  Altogether, “14 years, 30 stories, and nearly 100 rejections before [his] first story sale (see full timeline here).

Tobias S. Buckell (50 short stories, 7 novels): No age timeline, but in an essay wrote, “my own record is 24 rejections before selling a single story,” and “I have over 650 rejections logged in my files” (see full essay here).

So, obviously, it would be kind of hard to make any specific generalizations about how long it takes to become a professional writer based on this small, nonrandom, anecdotal sample, but it does give you a soft feel for what may be typical.  Dozens to hundreds of rejections over several years or even decades….  Since I started writing in November, I guess I should plan on seeing some success around 2017.

How to Start Writing Fiction

Okay, so on the topic of beginning writers, I thought I'd devote a post to how I got started.  I'm planning on devoting some time to statistics (number of stories, number of submissions, number of journals submitted to, etc.) later, but for now this is purely anecdotal.

In November of last year (2012), I was listening to NPR on my way to work on the 4th or 5th of the month, and I heard a story about NaNoWriMo.  Totally on a whim, I decided to do it, even though I had already missed a few days, and I had never written fiction before (aside from a school project in like 4th grade).  Fortunately, I had some down time, and I figured -- why not?  So I seriously just opened up a Word document on my laptop and started writing the first thing that came to my mind, and then I kept going, writing almost every day, and I had made it to almost exactly 50,000 (a couple of words over) when I finally wrote THE END on the last day of the month.  I was proud of myself for having "won," and I was surprised at how much I had enjoyed it.

When I first decided to do NaNoWriMo, I had figured I'd get bored with it and stop writing after I finished the contest, but it never happened, so I just kept writing.  I even started thinking about ideas for stories on my drives to/from work, and I would write them down on my breaks.  I actually had a short story submitted to a magazine before I even finished NaNoWriMo.

My writing has ebbed and flowed in the six months since I submitted that first story, but my interest hasn't waned a bit.  So now the trick is getting published.  More on that later, but as obvious as it sounds, for me the trick to getting started as a writer was just a matter of starting to write.

What to Blog About -- Beginning Writers

Okay, so I started this blog as just an outlet for whatever random stuff was rattling around my brain, and I figured I'd just start with whatever came out and figure out later how to organize it (if I decided I wanted to organize it).  And so far I've enjoyed it, so I'm going to keep it up...but I'm going to try to write more about writing fiction.  For reasons similar to those that got me to start this blog, I've been writing science fiction stories for a few months now as a way to feel like I'm using my brain for something creative (at least on some level), and I've learned some things about the process of getting published.  So I'll include whatever insights I think are relevant here, while tracking my progress as a beginning writer so hopefully someone else can learn from my mistakes or maybe take my attempts and find a new way of their own to make it work.

Naturally, as a beginning writer, I'm keenly interested in other beginning writers and in what it means to be a beginning writer.  But there doesn't seem to be much (at least with regard to specifics) out there on how to get started, so hopefully this will contribute somewhat to that topic area.  So far, I've come across several professional authors who are more than willing to impart their knowledge regarding how to get started (see for example here and here), but they seem pretty dismissive of trying any way other than the way they recommend, which rubs me wrong, first since the field of writing in general has changed so much in the last few years, and second since my interests haven't really lined up with what they think.  And isn't writing supposed to be creative anyway?

It could just be that I'm a beginning writer and don't know what I'm talking about, but I like to think I'm just being open-minded.  We'll see how it works out....

Top Ten German Compound Words Used in English

I love how when Germans want to make a new word, they just add two existing words together and create an entirely new concept.  This happens in English (and I'm sure other languages) as well, but it doesn't seem to be near as common -- or as effective -- as it is in German.

Here's a list of my ten favorite German compound words (most of them are commonly used in English):

In no particular order:

1.) wunderkind (literally "wonder child," a prodigy)
2.) gegenuber (literally "against over," meaning across from)
3.) blitzkrieg (literally "lightning war")
4.) doppelganger (literally "double goer")
5.) dummkopf (literally "dumb head")
6.) rinderpest (literally "cattle plague," the name of a cattle plague)
7.) schadenfreude (literally "harm joy," happiness at someone else's misfortune)
8.) ubermensch (literally "super man")
9.) schlitterbahn (literally "water road," the name of a waterpark in Texas)
10.) wanderlust (literally "travel desire")

Is It OK to Kiss Your Pet?

No.

Here's a list of diseases you can get from animals.  If you're a healthy adult who doesn't mind the possibility of missing a week of work so you can spend that time in the bathroom, you can go right ahead, but please don't tell your kids, pregnant women, people with organ transplants, or otherwise immunocompromised people that it's okay, like this guy.

And what's his (commonly used) justification?  "When's the last time you ever heard or read of a veterinarian dying of a zoonotic disease?" and "While disease transmission does happen now and then, it's usually more of an annoyance (like ringworm) than a threat."

Huh.  Tell that to these people.

Animals carry diseases.  They shed the organisms in their stool.  Then they lick themselves.  It doesn't take a genius (although it may take more than a DVM) to figure out the risk involved.

People get sick all the time from kissing their pets.  I'm sure some people have died from it.

But even if they didn't, it'd still be gross.

How Do I Know if a Restaurant Is Safe to Eat At?

I have to admit, I've never really been one to worry about how safe restaurants are to eat at.  I'm usually more worried about how much it costs and whether I like the kind of food they serve.  But the movement toward more openness in government has created a great opportunity to get a little better idea about how risky your favorite restaurant really is.

Rule #1: If a restaurant is open, it means that the health department determined on its most recent inspection that the restaurant was safe for you to eat at.  This doesn't guarantee you won't get sick, but it's definitely something good to keep in mind no matter how high or low the restaurant scored on its last inspection.

Rule #2: Restaurant inspections are anything but a guarantee.  How well a restaurant's most recent inspection went only tells you how how well the restaurant's most recent inspection went.  However, though restaurants certainly have good days and bad days, many restaurant inspection sites show inspection scores over several years, giving you a good idea of how a restaurant performs on average.

Rule #3: While restaurant inspection scores are a great tool, keep your eyes open.  Just because the restaurant you're at had a perfect score a year ago doesn't mean you should ignore the undercooked hamburger or the dirty silverware.  If something sets off warning bells, speak up about it.  Ask lots of questions, and don't be afraid to send it back.

Okay, here's how to do it:

1.) Find restaurant inspections in your area.  I don't know how often this list gets updated, and new jurisdictions are going online all the time, so if your area's not on the list, look up your local health department's website and look for it there.  If you have to, call them and ask about it.  That's what they're there for.  If they don't have online scores, many states now have open records laws so you can submit a request and get the scores you want.  It might take a while though, so plan ahead.

2.) Look up your restaurant.  Most, if not all, online databases should be searchable, so it should be pretty easy to find the place you're interested in based on the name and/or address.

3.) Check the most recent inspection score.  Most health departments give a grade or score to help determine how well the restaurant did.  Many places base their grades on fixed cut-offs (e.g., getting below a 10 gives you an "A," 11-20 gives you a "B," etc.), while others give a ranking based on how the score compares to other restaurants (e.g., getting an "A" if your restaurant scored in the best 25%, a "B" for the next 25%, etc.).  Every health department is different, so take a minute to read up on how your health department does things and use that to determine how well the restaurant's score measures up.

4.) If possible, compare the score to past inspections.  Does the restaurant usually score high, or low?  Was its most recent inspection a fluke?  If available, go through the individual violations in the report.  Gather as much information as you can.

5.) Add up all the information and decide whether you feel like the restaurant is worth the risk.  If a restaurant usually scores well, but had a low score at its most recent inspection, it may have just been a bad day.  If a restaurant scores poorly, but it was for violations that don't seem too serious to you, you may decide that it meets your personal criteria for safe food preparation.  It's your call.

6.) Go out and eat!  (Or cook up a delicious meal at home....)  But remember, if you do decide--based on the data--that a restaurant meets your standards, remember to keep your eyes open.  What looks good on paper may not be quite so appetizing in person.

What Is Science?

"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

--Voltaire in letter to Frederick II of Prussia (6 April, 1767)

Somewhere along the course of its journey from Enlightenment to the present, science evolved from an aqueous unformed puddle of goo into the multicellular steel-boned behemoth we see today.  It converted from a gas into a solid.  The invisible incomprehensible God of the Westminster Confession reverted back into the vengeful Judeo-Christian God of the Old Testament, creating a resolute Master from what had once been an ambivalent guide.

At least this is what appears to have happened in the public domain.

It has become routine for groups of people with different opinions to beat each other over the head with science.  Instead of a quest for knowledge, it has become a sledge hammer, an indefatigable weapon-of-mass-destruction that acts irrefutably in the possessor’s behalf against all others.  Whenever I see it employed in the media or being wielded in website Comments sections, I usually wonder of the combatants: do you even know what science is?

Science goes through cycles called “paradigm shifts” (see Thomas Kuhn’s seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), where the previous model or perspective on truth is expanded or entirely replaced.  Some examples include Copernicus’ astronomic model orbiting the Earth around the Sun instead of vice-versa, Newton’s classical mechanics over Aristotle’s, and the emergence of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.  While it is definitely the norm for scientists to go with the current paradigm and learn all that can possibly be learned within it, the fact that every previous paradigm has at some point been overturned and replaced should make everyone a little more amenable to opposing views.

Science is not a concrete comprehensive encyclopedia of all knowledge.  It is the pursuit of knowledge, the act of seeking to obtain it.  So to believe in science is merely to believe that there are those who seek to learn more about the world around them.  Which I think is true of just about everyone.

Rivalries definitely exist in the scientific community, especially when small groups of scientists start following outside-the-current-paradigm lines of study.  But it’s nothing compared to what we see in the public domain.

And it’s not limited to a particular political persuasion (see for example “Republicans Against Science” in the New York Times and “Is Environmentalism Anti-Science?” in Discover Magazine).

Now don’t get me wrong--there are some serious issues going on here, and things would probably be a lot easier on everyone if everyone would just go with the current scientific consensus and trust the scientists to identify when our current paradigm needs a face-lift.  But at the same time, every time there’s been a paradigm shift in the past, it’s been because of people thinking against the grain.  And every single time, the new paradigm has been better than the last.

So consider your position carefully the next time someone asks you the banal question: “Don’t you believe in science?”  It’s true, you could just be another liberal kook or another entrenched conservative--only time will tell.  But at least you know what science is.  And on the off chance that you aren’t just a kook--if you've done your research and stick to your guns and against all odds somehow manage to turn out right in the end--you’ll be in really good company.

Texas Pledge of Allegiance

"Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible." (See here.)

I remember reciting this pledge (without the "one state under God," which was apparently added in 2007) when I was in grade school.  It's amazing how little things can stay with you (and subliminally affect you) the rest of your life.  I left Texas in 2001, but I've still got this sense of patriotism for my home state.  Here are the first things that came to my mind when I thought about just what in my childhood could possibly make me still want to pledge allegiance to the flag of Texas.

Where else would childhood recollections include (in no particular order):

1.) Using a cattle prod to zap 3 inch tadpoles in a horse trough;
2.) Shooting a several-days-old dead cow with a Glock handgun and watching it explode;
3.) Cutting off snake heads to nail above the entrance to your clubhouse;
4.) Naming your favorite pet after a girl in school and then eating it;
5.) Calling the rodeo kids "hicks" and then going home to feed your livestock;
6.) Thinking your teacher was a liberal hippie because she had a picture of then-President Clinton in her classroom;
7.) Hearing that your classmate races lawnmowers and thinking it's cool;
8.) Thinking that anyone who didn't two-step couldn't dance;
9.) Collecting garbage bags full of cow pies for $1.00 a bag (for fertilizer) and thinking it was a heckuva deal;
10.) Having the temperature hit 119 degrees and your coaches still not cancelling football practice.