Listen, listen. The only reason I am here on the ol’ Tumblr in the first place is I really liked writing stories, and I wanted someplace to share them. And it’s been a few lifetimes since I wrote fiction, but I’m glad this place and people are still here.
I never wrote this much in one go, or this much for any one story. What a time.
Hi there! Delighted you’re enjoying the relaunch: I was so lucky to get to be part of that.
The timeline for books like this? Aha, she says, looking at her chewed fingernails and gnawed knuckles. Sometimes it can be extremely tight. I think the quickest I have ever turned one round was 4 weeks (that was another franchise, not Trek, and it was, at least, only 50k). Generally, though, I have about 3-4 months to write (and we’ll have had a couple of months working on an outline before that). Sometimes I don’t get started early enough – but that’s a problem of my own making! That’s just the writing, though: editing, copy-editing, proofing, and of course printing and distributing have their own timetables, of another 3-4 months.
There are two main reasons why the turnaround on TV tie-in novels can be pretty tight. Firstly, everything has to be signed off by the studio as well as by the publisher, so that’s an extra round of approvals to everything (initial idea, outline, manuscript, etc.). So you’re part of a TV production as well as a publishing project, and all the promotional activity related to that.
Secondly, and connected to this, you’re locked into the deadlines of the show. For my first Picard novel, the book was slated to come out around episode 4 (partly so that Elnor and Zani, who are in the book, would make sense to the reader). So the schedule (writing, editing, copy-editing, proofing, printing, distributing, hitting the shelves, etc.) was absolutely fixed. As I recall, my editors were pretty worried that I’d overdo things – but I was flying! I loved writing that book! Sometimes having a tight deadline means you have to get very deeply immersed in your story, and that always means a better book.
When Star Trek was off-air (which was the case for the relaunch books), things were a little more leisurely! But I don’t mind the deadlines. I love writing, but it’s also very, very nice to have it done!
People out here criticizing R.L. Stine for making up titles and then writing a story for it like that’s weird??? When a good title knocks you answer the door and let it roam around the house.
I can’t wait to get good at programming so I can write hacky, nasty code that would make a computer scientist barf.
As someone who had Big Thoughts about writing and now still writes constantly but not that kind of writing that was exciting back then, and is now pursuing a new kind of writing used to tell a computer what to do, Justin Wolfe’s recent thank you note on the subject strikes some chords:
i’m thankful for how it’s ultimately, at least for the kind of writing i do, it’s not about equations and algorithms (even if you’re using them), it’s about how do you write in such a way that your lines best represent your intended meaning for multiple audiences (both to the robotic interpreter “reading” your code now in order to run it and to the humans reading your code now and later and much later to try to understand it and borrow from it and build on it) and how do you do that with clarity and efficiency (though that’s complicated, since what’s efficient might not be readable and vice versa) and how do you bridge between your individual stylistic choices and the different choices your teammates might make (i’m thankful for the engineers who are like formalist poets creating elegant (but sometimes opaque) structures of abstraction and i’m thankful for the people who write in a slightly shaggier but more immediately readable free verse and i’m thankful that i can find virtues in both and can stretch myself in either direction) and how do you manage the fact that these little parts you’re working on (because a person can only hold so many lines in their mind at one time) are part of ever-scaling networks of other parts, a tower projecting into the sky—how do you name things and organize things in such a way that those formal choices communicate the most meaning now and will continue to do so into the future.
On the local radio show a man who won a Pulitzer prize in fiction explained that one must write every day because if a person does not write everyday a person forgets how to access the subconscious. If one did not write everyday then whenever a person comes back to writing she would have to learn to write from the beginning again. This has always been my plan. I would like to not know how to write, also to know no words. I believe this prize winning novelist believed that the mind had two places, the conscious and subconscious, and that literature could only come out of the subconscious mind, but that language preferred to live in the conscious one. This is wrong. Language prefers to live on the Internet.
from “the innocent question” by anne boyer in garments against women (via nogreatillusion)
