Last February, I was a participant at the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I met lots and lots of people, but three people in particular: Katharine “Kit” Kerr, Alex Tillson, and Clint Talbert. Though it would probably surprise at least two of them to hear it, all three of them led me to great epiphanies about my writing this year.

For a magical hour or two, Katharine, the wonderful Philippa Ballantine, and I got an opportunity to sit down together in the quiet presenters’ lounge and talk long and passionately about writing. Technically, we were planning out what we would cover in our panel on fantasy. After the panel ended, and because she had time before the next appearance on her schedule, I invited Kit, on a lark, to come and sit with me on the editor/author 10-minute consultations I was doing. The two of us sat and evaluated first-pages of a bunch of manuscripts, encouraged a bunch of nervous authors (perhaps more nervous, for finding her there — surprise!), and we found a great synergy and bond between us as we did so. She picked out things I agreed with completely but wouldn’t have caught at a glance. Between that chat and those sessions, I think I learned even more than our authors did.

Clint Talbert is a promising writer who has become a good friend. Months later, we were talking and I mentioned that I feel selfish when I write; I have a hard time taking time away from my other work, on other people’s manuscripts which have contracts and deadlines and things, to write something of my own. He reminded me that every writer, no matter what their other work is, faces the same problem. I knew that, as an editor and advice-giver, but I hadn’t internalized it until he said it to me. You just have to make time for yourself, and write, just like everybody else. And since then, I have.

It was August, and I was musing about how to turn a particular one of my short stories into a novel, when Alex Tillson gave me possibly the simplest and most profound piece of writing advice I’ve ever received. She said, “Look at the decisions your characters have had to make [in the short story]. What can happen now that would turn those choices into the worst decisions they could have possibly made?” And that was the answer. So simple, and so brilliant. That’s where the plot was hiding. And it’s helped me craft every story since.

“Low-hanging fruit” is a common metaphor you’ll hear in writing circles, in reference to coming up with ideas. The lowest-hanging fruit on any tree are the easiest ones to reach and therefore the ones that get picked first. For writers, the metaphor usually suggests that the ideas you come up with first, or most easily, are going to be ideas that other people have had.

I’ve often seen it recommended, when writing short stories targeted for anthologies with specific themes, that writers reject the first five ideas they come up with. As the thought process goes, these are going to be the most obvious, easiest choices — the “low-hanging fruit”; the story ideas that everyone else will think of, too.

But it’s also said that “low-hanging fruit is the low-hanging fruit of metaphor.” (In addition to sounding potentially, well… Follow the link.) It’s an easy metaphor to use; a simplified way to think about something that may not actually be so simple or straightforward.

People are different, and people’s minds work differently. We don’t all have the same likes and dislikes, and we don’t all follow the same trains of thought. It would be pretty boring if we did. So, I don’t entirely buy the low-hanging fruit analogy when it’s applied to story ideas. I don’t believe that all people are going to strike upon the same idea as easiest or most obvious. There are too many variables between individuals. Between general life experience, what you’ve read or seen recently, a personal association with the topic, one person’s low-hanging fruit is not necessarily the same as another’s.

I’ve read a lot of queries for novel-length manuscripts over the past three or four years. I’ve also looked at anthology submissions, and I’ve talked to other anthologists. Trends emerge in submissions. This fascinates me, because it’s not usually popular media or current events that seem to have influenced writers’ ideas. And the ideas I would think of as “most obvious” are not always the ones that are most represented.

When I target a story for a particular anthology, I do think about the approaches that I think other writers are most likely to take. But, there’s a flaw in this: Unless I seek out other writers who are preparing stories, and poll them, I have no idea what kinds of things a given topic will make other people think of. I have no way of knowing whether I’m avoiding the trend, or second-guessing myself right into the middle of it. Maybe everyone is avoiding that ripest, most obvious apple and going for the second-ripest one. Maybe the obvious one is what the editor wants; if no one else is going to go for it, maybe picking it would give you a better chance.

You see, I hope, how this line of thinking can work you into writers’ paralysis if you’re not careful.

If you’re submitting to a second (or later) volume of an anthology on a particular theme, you can read the stories in prior volumes to make sure that you don’t reinvent them. That will help somewhat; you’ll be able to see trends in the earlier stories and do something different. Sometimes editors will tell you what they don’t want to see. But that still doesn’t help you out against all the other people who’ll be submitting for the new volume right along with you.

My advice: pick the fruit that looks most appealing to you.

When Ed Greenwood and I approached writers about When the Hero Comes Home, I could almost always see it in their eyes — there would be a spark of an idea that came to mind instantly, when writers heard the theme; something within them instantly surfaced, inspired. When that happens for you, take that and nurture it; tease it out until it’s the best story, and best expression of the theme, that it can be. Think about what other writers might be reaching for, yes, but don’t let it be your consuming worry. Go with the idea that inspires you, that you can put your own personal spin on. It’s that spark of you, that twist of something different, that will make your story rise to the top, even if a dozen others attempt the same theme. If you don’t write what you feel, if you focus instead on trying to predict what will be original and what will trend, you risk boxing yourself into a corner where you can’t write anything at all, for fear it won’t be the right thing. Since you can’t know what other people are going to be writing, the most effective thing you can do is write your story in your way. Put your voice and heart into it.

When all the fruit is harvested and taken to market, no one will know the order in which it was picked.

Paul Cornell, in his Reno 2011 WorldCon report, says many things near and dear — both to my own heart, and to my own convention-going experience. Read this and learn what these conventions are like, why we go to them and why we love them.

But one particular thing he says, which I’ve spent several years realizing, talking myself out of, and then realizing again, is this:

‘No!’ I’m saying that rather too loudly to James Bacon and company when someone tells me that the writer of the (great, but initially a bit buggy) Renovation iPad app has been getting flack from people who are treating his software as something produced as a professional product, ‘no, we should be after people treating us like that, we should aspire to professionalism!’ [...] I never like to see fans giving themselves the excuse that we’re just hobbyists. Because that displays a chasm between fandom and how every author I know drives themselves. And there are plenty of fan organisations that drive themselves that way too. [...] There’s just something about a certain sort of SF fandom that… likes shoddiness…

And it’s true. There’s a certain slipshod, impromptu, rough-around-the-edges-ness that seems as if it’s trying to portray a lifted corner of the fourth-wall curtain, a glimpse behind the scenes into the gear-mechanisms that keep all of this smooth and easy-looking exterior running for us. There’s a perceived value in that accidental unprofessionalism, as if the onlooker will grow and gain from seeing the growth and the smoothing-of-edges coming of age process of the work.

Sometimes I try to talk myself into accepting that, because…well, because there are so many becauses, I think, first and foremost. There are so many reasons why things are this way that it feels like rocking a well-established boat, raining on a bunch of very enthusiastic parade-organizers, to suggest things should be different. But we all, even those of us who are professionals, are still fans. We still volunteer our blood and sweat and hearts to this genre and community, and we bring our professional standards to our endeavors because of our respect and love for it. There is absolutely no reason to do anything less than aspire to professional standards, when you are setting out places for professionals; when you are aspiring to be those professionals; when you know (or simply hope) that the eye of the entire world may be watching.

When mistakes inevitably creep through in the projects that I’m involved in, I sometimes meet this same attitude; either “We’re just small press, no one expects perfection from us” or “You learn to shrug it off and not worry about it so much” or “Maybe no one will notice.” I never want to learn to shrug off less-than-excellence and let it not matter. That’s not in my nature, and I don’t want it to be. I accept that I will not always achieve excellence or perfection, but I hold a burning seed of that professionalism as my core and engine, and aiming for less than perfection as a standard, is never enough for me. Thank you, Paul. Needless carelessness, rationalized needless carelessness, infuriates me, too.

And that brings me to Krista D. Ball’s observation likening sloppiness in self-publishing to knowingly scamming readers out of money.

Here’s the thing. I am not a charity. I have no interest in giving my money to someone who hasn’t even taken the time to try. I’ve worked hard to learn what I have about my craft. I’m still learning, still working hard, still trying to push myself. Slapping together a story that’s never been beta read, never been critiqued, never been edited, AND KNOWING IT HAS PROBLEMS and then expecting people to pay money for it? That isn’t “indie” publishing. That isn’t “giving it to publishers.” That isn’t “the readers will decide what’s good and what’s not.”

That’s just plain lazy.

It’s the same divide in standards of quality. There are a lot of self-published authors Doing It Right, but there’s a growing population of the careless who are exactly the stereotyped worst of the worst — the ones who give self-publication the tarnished reputation that it has.

As Krista adds in the comments: “I’m convinced that financially supporting these scammers, I mean writers, isn’t helping them get better. All they’ll say is “I’m making $100/month. People are buying my stuff. Why should I improve?”

Standard of quality, people. We owe it to ourselves, to our readers and to our genre. It’s easy to make excuses and say “We’re just a fan-run organization” or “I’m just with a small press,” or “I’m just a self-published author,” but until you take that “just” out of the equation and step up to the commitment of seeking excellence for yourself no matter where you fit into the larger picture, you will always be a “just,” and the rest of the system you so want to be a part of will sag and suffer for it.

An uncaring attitude will become habit, such that if you should get to some invisible line where you tell yourself you’ve made it and it’s time for that standard of excellence to come into play, laziness will already be ingrained in you, and your first steps into that professional world will become a serious struggle to keep up.

I posted a while back about the continued need for gatekeepers in publishing; these posts highlight that need.

Learn good habits early. Strive for perfection, polish, professionalism. It is never too early to start behaving like a professional and earning professionals’ respect. Don’t do less than your best, just because you can. There’s nothing endearing about unintentional rough edges, or that peek behind the curtain into a machine that’s falling apart. This is your chance to showcase your best, in front of the people you admire. Bring your best game, always.

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EDITED TO ADD: @Paul_Cornell, in a response, wished to point out that James [Bacon] himself is very professional indeed. It wasn’t my intention to suggest otherwise (I was impressed with the convention app, and its timely updates!), but to give a nod to the quoted conversation for crystallizing an important issue for me. Thank you, Paul!

If you’re in publishing, even if you’re not in New York City yourself, you probably know a lot of people who are–or have been–based there.

Nobody talks about it much, especially not any more, but if you know people who’ve lived and worked in New York City for a while, if you know people in publishing in New York, you probably know at least a good handful of 9/11 survivors. The victims and their families get a lot of the press, as they should, but you don’t hear much about the survivors and the witnesses. It’s largely because they don’t want it, or because there’s a perception that they don’t, or because there’s a certain discomfort about what to say or do. It’s the elephant in the room.

Many of the New York publishing houses are up toward Midtown. The publisher I worked for (Scholastic) is in SoHo, right on Broadway, a little more than a handful of blocks away.

My name is Gabrielle and I’m a 9/11 survivor. I don’t talk about it much, especially not any more, but I am.

And I’m not unique. Everyone in my company, in my building, was there too. We saw it happen. Not live on television or on endless tape loops after the fact, but right out our open windows or from our own office’s rooftop balcony. We watched the second plane hit, and we watched the towers fall. All of us were evacuated and sent out into the panic on the streets with no news, no direction, and — for many of us who commuted — no way home.

All of us breathed and blinked our eyes in that toxic air for months, and several of us suffered health effects from it. I’m one of the many who now have a chronic eye condition, a permanent souvenir that will never go away. I consider myself lucky to have gotten off that easy. No two people handle trauma in exactly the same way or have exactly the same experience, but suffice it to say, all of us were changed.

I don’t bring it up much unless it’s relevant, but I’ve also always made a point not to shy away from the topic, either. It was a very different experience, actually being there, and I’ve always had a drive to explain it to people who want to understand.

At the same time, it’s left me very sensitive in some ways, and to some themes in fiction — and not the ones you might expect. They’re themes that haven’t come up yet in my work, so I can’t speak to whether I’ll be okay working with them in a professional sense if they do, or if there will end up being some books that my own PTSD just won’t let me work on. Time will tell.

Though reactions are specific and individual, That Tuesday never comes and goes without notice for those of us who witnessed it firsthand, even when it falls on a different day of the week. There’s definitely no chance of forgetting. We might pretend it’s just another day, but even if we don’t let it get to us, there’s still an awareness of it. When I was still in New York, I’d always take the day off, just so that I didn’t have to deal with the panic inherent in that morning’s commute.

Now, I just try to keep busy. I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to be asked if I’m okay. I don’t want sympathy. I just want to get through it quietly and keep my mind on other things until the calendar flips.

I’d suggest handling any contact with NYCers the same way. If someone wants their day to be business as usual, the most sensitive thing you can do for them is to let it be just that. If they want to talk about it, they will. No one’s going to think you’re insensitive if you let the elephant in the room blend in with the decor.

Personally, I’ll go back to being willing to talk about it on Monday. Until then, I’d rather avoid the media and immerse myself in my work. I’ll remember and reflect quietly, in my own time and in my own way.

Tor.com has a good four-part article on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Fiction (part 2 continues here, and part 3 spotlights how The West Wing Got It Right).

reprinted; originally posted September 2009

Friday afternoon, I met up with a local authorfriend for lunch, and ended up spending the afternoon swapping books and stories, and I left feeling wonderfully recharged. I don’t get to see my co-workers in the office every day, and that makes spending time with colleagues more special. Especially in such a solitary field, I think we tend to forget or push aside the value of actual face-to-face time with other people who are doing what we’re doing, and how inspiring and motivating it can be. Conferences are great for reconnecting, but it’s nice to be reminded that we don’t have to wait for a conference to provide an opportunity.

Saturday afternoon, I drove down to the local office supply store to get my posters printed for GenCon. I could have done it online, and I had researched a few online print services, but I decided I wanted the instant gratification of getting them made locally, and I wanted some expert guidance on the matter. I ended up getting a really nice, helpful copy specialist. He gave me good advice on the products that might best meet my needs, and the final results ended up being cheaper and more durable than what I would have gotten online, with the added benefit of being able to inspect them for myself before I paid for them. My file was being stubborn, but he poked and prodded and troubleshot it until it worked. When it didn’t print out correctly, we could fix it right away instead of having to deal with returns, customer service, reordering, and more shipping.

Online transactions are certainly easier and more convenient for some things, but there’s a danger in making them the default. Sometimes an old-fashioned, personal approach is still the best.

Last week, Richard Lee Byers was here, sharing five truths about publishing that nobody told him.

Richard made a lot of good points, so I wanted to follow up with a response. Please consider this post an addendum, not a rebuttal.

1. You will hate your book cover for 24 hours. Then you will fall in love with it.

I’ve worked on a lot of books with a lot of authors, and I’ve seen all of them go through this process. It’s easy to sit back and watch it happen, it’s even easier to sit back impatiently and wait for them to come around. Especially in houses where the author is given little or no control over the direction of the book cover.

At Dragon Moon Press, it’s common to get the author’s input, receive between three and five concept sketches from the artist, and solicit the author’s opinion on those sketches. Ideally, author and publisher are in agreement over which sketch to pick, and the artist goes forward.

Rarely is the final product love at first sight. I know this, but I didn’t really understand it until the book was my own. I was in love with the cover art when the artist turned it in, I knew what overall design I wanted, but when the finished cover came through, it was…not a perfect match for what was in my head.

This turned out to be a good thing. The ideal that had been kicking around in my head for a year made an okay poster, but it didn’t make a good book cover. The title didn’t show up, and there were bits and pieces that didn’t quite work on the screen the way they had in my mind. The actual final product was better. But, it was different, and I had a hard time coming around to that at first. I slept on it, and when I stopped comparing it to the mockup and looked at it with fresh eyes, I really liked it.

It takes 24 hours. Even for me.

2. It’s okay to question things that look wrong.

Every step of the way, there are people working on your book, and people are capable of human error. Not much of it, hopefully, but it happens. Look out for your best interests, and don’t assume that people are infallible or that all their choices have been deliberate ones. If something looks wrong or feels wrong, ask (politely) if it’s wrong.

At the worst, you’ll get some obscure rule of layout or typesetting or grammar explained to you (did you know that when a chapter starts with dialogue and a drop cap, it’s traditional and acceptable to leave off the opening quotation mark?), and you’ll know it for next time.

At best, you’ll catch a mistake while it’s still early enough to fix it (is there a reason this one paragraph is in a different font, or the dedication has been moved to the back of the book? Nope, just a slip. Good catch).

3. Publishing is cliquish.

Richard said this in his post, and it’s true.

Publishing is a high-stakes business, often with short deadlines. Editors and publishers are going to be most inclined to want work with people they’ve worked with before, and whom they can trust to be professional and deliver high-quality work, on time, with minimal drama. They’re more likely to think of the people they like working with when opportunities come up.

A lot of opportunities happen serendipitously, just because people happen to be at the right place at the right time, a spark happens, an idea forms. “I like you and I like your work. Let’s collaborate on something,” forms the beginning of many a project. It’s not a case of “I only work with my friends” so much as, “I liked her story in that anthology, I’d love to have her write for mine.” “I hear he’s a lot of fun to work with.” “Someone bailed on me, and I hear you can whip out a great story in a couple days. Can you help me out?”

In my case, I tapped the shoulders of a few people I’d worked with before, and a few people I just admired. And a lot of the writers in my anthology have become my friends, and have proven themselves professional and easygoing and brilliant, so of course I want to work with them again.

It’s safer to take risks when you’re putting your fate in the hands of safe, known quantities whom you know you can trust to fulfill their end of the deal, than with unknown or difficult people. That’s true on the playground, when you’re trying to recruit friends to help you move, when you’re picking your lab partner, and everywhere else in life. Publishing is no different.

There’s nothing wrong with using this knowledge to your advantage. Network and make friends in the industry. Come up with neat ideas and invite neat, dependable people to join in with you.

4. Publishing is a small, small world. Never burn your bridges–even bridges you don’t think will matter.

This goes hand in hand with #3, but deserves its own mention.

In the world of F&SF writing and publishing, everyone knows everyone. Learn this, and don’t forget it. The same people will often end up entering your professional sphere again, maybe in different roles, and if you’ve stormed off on bad terms from someone, or said something public and damaging in the heat of the moment, it may brand you as difficult to work with. It may mean that you don’t get picked for an opportunity. And when you and that person cross paths again, they may be in a position of authority over you, somewhere new.

I’ve been doing acquisitions at Dragon Moon Press for a couple years now, and I’ve got a pretty good memory. If someone responded to a DMP form rejection letter with insults and threats, I’d remember them. I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend them now that I’m working with Pyr.

Luckily, and to my extreme delight, in cases where I’m ending up working with the same authors again and again for multiple publishers, as we each rise in our parallel careers, it’s with authors that I consider close personal friends. But still, it’s been eye-opening.

It’s okay to have differences of opinion, and to look out for your own interests, but always handle it professionally. Don’t piss off anyone, because you never know where that anyone is going to end up.

5. People with authority answer to people with more authority.

Richard mentioned that editors don’t like to say no or break promises. This is absolutely true. But editors don’t always have the power to say yes or to make promises. Sometimes “I really want to work with you” or “I really want to sign this book” or even “I really want to make this happen” can sound like a promise, but it isn’t. Editors may not ultimately have the power to follow through, as much as they want to.

Editors can connect with an author and fall in love with a manuscript, but they ultimately have to answer to their publishers and justify that connection with facts and figures. And the publisher, who wasn’t at that convention talking with you over coffee and didn’t get swept up in your pitch, may not be as easily swayed, or may have other things lined up, or may be aware of a host of other limiting factors.

Editors don’t like to say no or break promises, especially if they’ve already worked with you, and especially face to face, but they may not be the editor’s promises to make. I’ve been in a position where there have been manuscripts I really wanted to sign, but haven’t had clearance to. It’s easier to do that sort of negotiating behind the scenes and keep it invisible to the author, but–if there’s been personal contact with the author, like if I’ve worked with them before or I’ve heard their pitch at a convention–it’s not always possible.

Just because an editor wants to promise you something, doesn’t always mean they can.

Don’t count on anything as set in stone until the ink is dry, and not even then–there are still conditions to be met and unexpected circumstances that can break a deal.

And then? If the editor goes silent, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re avoiding you. An editor really, really doesn’t want to have to be the one to let you down. Especially not when they were the one that believed in you enough to make that offer in the first place. It could be that they’re working behind the scenes to try to get things aligned for you and find ways to make it work.

—

So, now you have five truths nobody told me about publishing, from more of an editorial perspective.

If any other publishing-folk want to contribute five, I’d be happy to run them as a future post!

Just a brief cautionary tale today.

Lately I’ve been trying to improve the work-productivity of my iPad. It’s a nifty thing for reading and for watching Netflix, but I want to be able to do work on it too. I want it to replace my netbook when I travel. It can’t completely take over until someone develops a word processing app with “track changes,” but copyediting isn’t the only thing I do.

To that end, I’ve been writing on it. I have a bluetooth keyboard that works pretty well. The return key is right where my pinky expects the apostrophe to be, but that’s muscle memory training more than anything else. That can be overcome.

When I write, I often use placeholders for names. I wait until the characters are developed enough to tell me what their names are, or at least what characteristics their names should have. I’ve written several stories where I’ve gotten away with not naming characters at all, but unfortunately that’s not always possible.

I go for the simplest of placeholder names: A, B, C…and so on.

However. This turns out not to have been the smartest strategy for writing on the iPad. Because now, after two full stories about A and A’s life, my iPad has taught itself to correct as to a’s.

Doh.

(I know a woman named A, actually. She is very cool, and you should hang out with her if you get a chance. Her name was meant to be a placeholder, too. So I guess the other lesson here is not to use A as a placeholder name because it might stick. In fiction or real life.)

So. Now my placeholders will be B, C, D…and so on, and not letters whose possessive forms are actual (and more common) words.

Just be aware: no matter what placeholder strings you like to use in your own writing, this could happen to you.

Thank you, predictive text technology!

Writer’s inertia is one of the big issues I face when I seek to set down a story. It’s not to be confused with writer’s block — I have the idea, I know exactly where it’s going…and in a way, that’s exactly the problem.

I write really solidly at first: I establish the set-up, get all the little pieces aligned, follow the roller coaster’s climb up the steep hill…and then I stop at the top.

It’s supposed to be a little pause to catch my breath, but it turns into a longer and longer pause, like I’ve stopped to appreciate the view.

It may be, as I was discussing with a writer and friend last night, that once I can see the rest of the story laid out before me and I know exactly how it’s going to end, I lose the drive to write the rest of it down. I know what happens, and on some level, that’s what’s satisfying to me.

However, if I’m intending to ever get a story published or otherwise share it with readers, I know that’s not enough. All the intentions and plans in the world won’t show someone what happens in the story if it’s not established on the page, and I know that.

So…how to get past the inertia and find the momentum again?

I like to tell writers that everyone’s got weaknesses in their writing, and the trick is in discovering and recognizing your weaknesses so that you can work around them. If you know there are certain words you always misspell, you’ll know to check your manuscript carefully for those words. If you know you have a trouble with evolving character names, you’ll know to check carefully to make sure that your characters don’t spontaneously rename themselves. And so on. I firmly believe that all problems that you-the-writer are self-aware of, are solvable problems. This one is no different.

There are a couple of tricks that I’ve developed to fight my writer’s inertia.

1. Stop writing in the middle, at a point where you know with certainty what’s coming next.

It’s intuitive to pause at the end of a section, or when you get to the end of what you’ve figured out. That’s too neat an ending for me. As difficult as it is, I try to only pause at points where I know exactly what happens next, with definite confidence. Places where, if I had to pause for a week, I could still come back to the file and know exactly what I meant and where I was going with it. That helps keep that forward momentum going. It’s much easier to start from a glide than from a dead stop.

This can mean stopping mid-chapter, mid-paragraph, or even (I know — it makes me twitch, too!) mid-sentence. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, and if the rest of that sentence aches and rattles in your head for an hour, or a day, or a few days, it’s pretty unlikely that those few completing words will be alone when they come out onto the page. The words behind them will probably spill more easily, too.

2. Since I know how it’s all going to play out from here, there’s nothing stopping me from explaining it to someone else.

I can write a letter to a friend or a writing partner, in which I start to describe all the things that happen in the rest of the story. I go back and add detail. I add narrative and voice, and dialogue. Writing it out this way allows me to address the questions I have about the directions the story should take. I find that if I do so in such a stream-of-consciousness way, I’ll find myself providing the answers, too.

Before I know it, I’ve tricked myself into writing the part that wouldn’t come out. I can use that to get past my inertia, and if I’ve come up with some passages I like, I can snip the best of them right into my draft.

These are the methods I’ve found for getting myself back on the rails and finding the forward momentum to push through my inertia. Have you tried these tricks, or others? What works for you?

It’s a beautiful day here in San Francisco today. The temperature is mild, the sky is cloudless, and there’s a perfect gentle breeze.

I’m not saying this to earn the ire of everyone still struggling under winter’s grasp. I’ve put in my due time in colder climates, I don’t miss the snow, and you all have my sympathy.

I say it because I’ve just had to close the window on all of it. Not because rainclouds are coming in, or because the air’s turned cold, but because there’s a beginning bagpiper in my neighborhood who likes to practice outdoors. For about an hour and a half at a time, the tranquil air is disrupted by what sounds like the screech of six or seven cats, all being strangled slightly out of tune with each other.

I’m all for music and the arts. I’ve been playing instruments almost all my life, was briefly on a music scholarship to university, and even seriously considered it as a career path. I love music, I support musicians, and I strongly encourage practice as a means to improvement. And I know the mystery musician, whoever it is, is trying.

But practice isn’t polish. It isn’t a performance, and maybe it shouldn’t be treated as one…especially when it’s inflicted on the unwilling. I admire the neighborhood bagpiper’s enthusiasm and their resolve to put in an hour and a half on scales and simple tunes every day, I just wish that practice would happen somewhere more private. Somewhere indoors. I’d like to wait and be treated to a performance when the playing is of performance quality — when it’s in tune, confident, and hitting the correct notes with feeling and style.

It’s the same when an aspiring author puts unfinished writing out on the web. You’re enthusiastic to share your art, but what you’re really showing people — and relying upon to make your impression on them — is most probably unpolished and not quite tuned. Andrew Jack wrote about that on his blog today, as the basis for a post about writing mistakes that you can learn from.

There’s one thing Andrew doesn’t address in his post, and that’s that the other end of the spectrum can be an equal problem, too: Imagine hearing a fantastic musician through the window and not being able to track them down to find more of their work, or learn where they might be performing. Contrast my bagpiper, practicing outdoors without being performance-ready, with a street busker. Buskers are aware that they’re performing, not practicing, and present themselves accordingly: many of them have their name visible, or a promotional handout, or a handmade CD for purchase.

If you have writing samples up where they can be seen, it’s because you want them to attract positive attention. But, if you succeed at that and then can’t follow through — if you don’t have a finished work to offer — you may lose out on potential sales or opportunities. An editor or agent who follows your name to your website, likes what they see, and then learns that the work isn’t complete, will probably not have time to wait. Or the luxury of trusting you to have the discipline to complete it. They’ll be disappointed, they’ll move on to something that’s finished and polished, and then you’ll be disappointed.

Practice in private, perform in public. Don’t let your first impression be less than your polished best, and own your presentation. You never know who’s listening.

As much as we all think we should have our flying cars by now, science fiction doesn’t exist to predict the future. (Nor, necessarily, to prevent it — an assertion that has been attributed to both Frank Herbert and Ray Bradbury.)

Science fiction — and all speculative fiction — exists to speculate. It takes a situation, a theory, a certain pattern or process, to its logical conclusion…or perhaps beyond it. It doesn’t necessarily predict the future or make value statements about what the future should or should not be. Some fiction does, certainly, but much of it isn’t intended to be taken quite so heavy-handedly. The process of plot and setting creation is, much more often, a big game of “what-if.” It’s a chance to explore the roads that the “if” opens, whether they’re good roads, bad roads, unattractive roads, even wildly improbable roads.

Dystopian fiction often makes the progression from our “now” to some imagined future an easy one to follow, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s what the author “believes” (or even “warns”) will happen. It is fiction, meant to entertain and to speculate about possibilities, not a prediction for time to prove right or wrong. When stories are grounded that way, it is usually to offer extra dramatic tension for the reader, in the form of plausibility so vivid that it provokes a “this could happen to me” personal investment in the story.

(I remember reading Stephen King’s “The Stand” over the same weeks outlined in the book as the beginning of the outbreak. It definitely added an extra creep factor. But that doesn’t mean that I believed it to be predictive. Or that it was meant to be.)

If every science fiction story were a manifestation of the author’s sincere belief about the future of our civilization, no author would be able to produce more than one fictional universe or ultimate outcome.

This probably sounds simplistic, but in the wide world of speculative fiction there are a lot of folks who get so caught up on a particular tree that they miss the forest. It can be the tree of race, the tree of science, the trees of sociology, anthropology, or gender equality, or of prediction. I’ve been as guilty of nitpicking the science in my science fiction as much as anyone has — second-guessing and fact-correcting are, after all, part of my job.

But at some point, all authors must take a leap from “what we know right now as true” to “something else.” And sometimes a speculated possibility touches a nerve for someone, or excludes someone, or offends someone, or presumes that history diverged from its actual path or its most likely future course in ways that are uncomfortable to think about. That makes the fiction no less valid and the writer no worse, no more insensitive, no less ethical a person.

It was suggested in a panel at SETIcon that one of the disservices Gene Roddenbery did to the Star Trek universe was to presuppose a time when humanity had buried all its differences, cured disease and hunger, and removed the need for money. Conflict creates drama, and with these sources of internal conflict removed, the only sorts of conflict that remained to be explored were technological failure, and external conflict with other cultures. Yet the stories that succeeded best were the ones where we saw a conflict between crewmembers or within a single individual. Creating such a stable utopia as a premise removed the opportunities to explore that sort of conflict that might have otherwise existed.

Fiction can be poorly written, it can be poorly planned, it can make logical leaps that the narrative can’t support, or it can offer a world that seems unpleasant or distasteful to us — a world in which we would not want, or would not be able, to live. But is not morally or ethically wrong for an author to posit any premise and see where that premise leads.

I can’t get offended at a book where people of any certain group are kept as slaves, or where we assume the indigenous people of a land didn’t exist, or where Germany won the war. I think all these things are valid speculations. They are not necessarily any sort of moral or value statement by the author, they are simply hooks with logical conclusions to be explored.

It is the job of speculative fiction to speculate and to entertain.

It is also the job of speculative fiction to get there in a way that doesn’t feel contrived, in which the hook does not feel like a hook, and in such a way that I can believe the world that the author creates. It has to diverge from our reality in a way that makes sense, the rules of the world have to behave consistently, and it has to be carefully thought out.

But it is not the job of speculative fiction to predict the future, or to make value statements about how the past should have happened. It is not the job of speculative fiction to apologize for itself.