What if Starfleet Outlived the Federation?

In the Star Trek series, the governmental body that Starfleet had to answer to was the United Federation of Planets. One presumes it was the Federation that created Starfleet.

Since the Federation is made up of many different planets with utterly different customs, and different ideas about right and wrong, it would not be at all surprising if there was a lot of interplanetary strife. And I don't really see Starfleet being sent to attack a planet that decided to drop out of the Federation.

But what if the Federation fell apart? What if issues arose to the point that nearly every planet in the Federation decided to drop out and go it alone?

Now, the most likely fate of Starfleet if the Federation fell apart is that the individual planets would demand pieces of Starfleet--- ships, starbases and the like.

But with the central authority having fallen apart, Starfleet might not be much inclined to meet those demands, especially as each world would have different ideas as to how much of Starfleet they were entitled to. Starfleet might choose to hang together just long enough for these things to be worked out in some authoritative way, and in time realize there is no authoritative body able to make that happen.

With the fall of the Federation, the biggest challenge faced by Starfleet would be how to deal with the loss of tax revenues. But if you are enough of a Star Trek geek, you may have noticed a certain lack of commercial space transport. There are not many private space liners or space freighters out there, perhaps because of the dangers of encountering hostile forces in an unarmed ship.

Starfleet, therefore, could continue by offering space transportation for a fee, and also providing defense of any private space transport for a fee. Planets who found themselves without adequate space transport after the Federation ended would be eager to avail themselves of the service.

There is also the possibility of selling defensive services. This would make Starfleet into a fleet of mercenaries. It could even degenerate into a protection racket if Starfleet people weren't such Big Damn Heroes. Various worlds might pay Starfleet ships to patrol near their star systems, catching any hostile vessels that might be coming their way.

The big culture shock for Starfleet people, the pampered children of the Federation taxpayer, would come as they had to start looking at the bottom line for the first time ever. Exploring strange new worlds would have to take a back seat to transporting passengers and cargo and doing routine patrols. I believe that in time they would have to wise up and add a Merchant Officer to their command crew, just as they have a Science Officer.

I think in time Starfleet would adapt, would perhaps even see the new order of things as beneficial to them. What do you think?

In a writing project of my own, Starship Destine, I've created a world in which something like the fall of the Federation has occurred in the past, and the Fleet has learned long ago to cope with that situation.



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Have You Tagged Your Characters Lately?

Character tags are the little things that make your characters more distinct. Harry Potter's scar is a character tag. So is Scarlett O'Hara's practice of deciding to think about some troubling matter 'tomorrow.'

A character tag can be something visual, or something the character says, or a mannerism or behavior, or even the reaction of others to that character when he walks into a room--- if everyone says a certain character 'looks creepy', for example.

The best character tags are ones that tell you a little more about the character. Harry Potter's scar tells about his tragic past, and his current unwilling connection to Lord Voldemort. Scarlett O'Hara's thinking about things 'tomorrow' shows something about her personality.

Other character tags are less revealing, but they help the reader to tell one character from another, which in turn makes it possible for the reader to build up a mental picture of the character.

Main characters have many things about them that serve as character tags. Since the main character is onstage all the time or nearly so in much fiction, there may be less need of the character tag for the purpose of telling that character apart from others. But to mention each character tag a couple of times helps build the reader's understanding of the character.

Secondary characters may be harder for the reader to tell apart from one another. They should have a few strong character tags that you use for them. If the character is onstage most of the time--- as in the main character's sidekick--- your use of character tags may be similar to the way you do it for main characters. If the secondary character is only intermittently present, you might need to use a character tag on each reintroduction. At least during the first half of the book.

Minor characters--- as in, characters even less prominent than the secondary ones--- are not deeply developed. They may be nothing more than a name, a function in the story, and a character tag or two.

Using a character tag can seem a bit repetitious. But as the character tag is a learning tool to help your reader learn the things he must know to enjoy the story, a little repetition is a good thing and can seem invisible to the reader if not overdone. And you can use your writer's creativity to find ways to use the same character tag in different ways when needed.

Race and Physical Characteristics in Tagging

Race and other physical characteristics can be used as a character tag, and they must be to ensure that your reader is aware of these things. Many readers skim-read and may not notice a first mention of such things. I did that with a book once only to find in the last 1/4 of the book the character I had been following throughout the book was a Black man and that this fact, at that point, was causing him a problem.

In the English-speaking world, the reader will tend to assume that a character is of the Caucasian race, of normal height rather than being a dwarf or a giant, not missing limbs or wheelchair-bound and without massive scarring, mutilations or deformities unless you, as a writer, mention that difference.

In the case of Black characters, race is such an explosive issue that many non-Black authors fear to mention the race of their Black characters at all, or mention it briefly, once, with a shudder, and then go on to write safer things. Worse, they may try to be subtle and say the Black character likes jazz, reads a book by Alice Walker, or have him use slang expressions derived from hip-hop culture, and assume he's told the reader the race of that character. This 'subtlety' limits your ability to develop Black characters beyond the stereotype, and it doesn't reveal the information you want revealed. That hip-hop slang can also be used by a 65-year-old Japanese-American news stand owner, and the Russian mafia boss is likely to be a jazz fan as well.

In older books people were franker about Black characters. They would say 'black' right in front of God and everybody, more than once. If Professor Jasper was a Black man, you might see something like this:

"Professor Jasper?"
The black man turned. "What do you want?"
"Could you explain the bit about the theory of relativity again?"
"What part don't you get?"
"All of it."

The main point is, we as writers, if we want to present a diverse world full of Black people and Asians and little people and men with artificial legs need to man up, eschew political correctness, and say what we mean to help our readers make an accurate picture of our characters.

 Twitchy tagging

Some writers, in their character tagging, tend to use nervous tics, hand-wringing, hair-twisting, and the like as tags all too frequently.  They think these devices make their characters more memorable.

But the problem is that tags not only help the reader tell characters apart, they also reveal things about characters. If you have a hand-wringing character and a hair-twisting character and a few more with nervous tics of different sorts, you end up with a twitchy group of characters, to the extent that your character group seems highly unrealistic. And in a major character, twitchy tags can be off-putting.

It's best, then, to avoid these types of tags unless you have a character whose personality is really expressed by them. Also to be avoided are excessively bizarre tags such as a character that starts taking off her clothes every time someone says the word 'and'. Stick with the more conventional tags nearly all of the time to best connect with your readers.

Posts about character tagging

Building Fictional Characters
Tags for Secondary Characters
Character Tags in Fiction
Character Tags: Michael Scott and Mustache Jeff


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Poetry Sunday: paper dragons, new poetry group, poetry zine

paper dragons

blue & yellow folded paper dragons
sail away in an indigo Tintenfaß
dragons dangerous yet delicate
for they cannot breathe fire
and live

(c) Nissa Annakindt 1990

The word 'Tintenfaß is German for 'inkwell'. The funny letter at the end is pronounced like 's'.  This is the origin of the poem: one day I was looking through a mail order catalog from Dover Books and came across several advertised books about Origami, the Japanese art of folding paper. One of the book descriptions must have mentioned that it gave instructions for making Origami dragons. And so this poem kind of poured out as poetry often did in those days.

This is one of the poems in my poetry book, Where the Opium Cactus Grows.  Shared in Poetry Pantry #159 over at Poets United.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Poetry Group, Poetry Zine

For a couple of years, some time ago, I used to edit a zine. It was something I liked to do and wasn't half bad at. But the printing and postage cost a lot.

When I self-published my poetry book on Lulu.com, I first began to get the idea that Lulu.com might be a great way to publish a zine. But it took me a while to get to the idea of doing a poetry zine.

The advantage of doing it as a Lulu.com book is that the 'zine' will be a nicely printed book with a cover, and it won't cost me a fortune making that happen. I wouldn't be able to pay in contributors' copies--- the poets would have to buy their own copy/copies.

Now, the hard part would be to find some poets who write what I could recognize as quality work. So I thought of starting a Facebook group for poets. Here it is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/479819908761898/

Both the group and the future zine are called 'Red Explosions'--- a line from an old poem of mine--- because it expresses what I want--- poems with something vivid, explosive, strange, or interesting. Not a bland collection of words as in:

my girlfriend
dumped me,
I feel
like sh*t
and want
to
die
die
die

(If you want to see further examples of what I, perhaps due to a lack of mental health, think of as poetry, you might go to my book on Amazon.com and look at the free preview there at some of the poems I've written.)

While I am not accepting submissions just yet, if you are interested in submitting to the zine, you might do well to join the Facebook group so you can share poems there. If I like your stuff enough, I will probably ask you to submit when the time comes.

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Killing People with Science Fiction's Non-Lethal Weaponry

My first encounter with the concept of non-lethal weapons was the Star Trek phaser. You could set a phaser to stun, or you could set it to kill and seriously vaporize a guy.  

But even in the Star Trek universe phasers set to stun could go wrong and then you'd hear those immortal words, "He's dead, Jim."

How could that happen? Well, people differ in their physiology and state of health. It's like giving people sedatives. A dose that would subdue a raging NFL player might kill a little old lady with a heart condition. The same thing happens with any kind of stunning weapon. Force that can stun a strong person will kill other people.

In real-world efforts to create stunning weapons (such as tasers), that is a problem. No stunning weapon yet made that is effective enough to stop most people is harmless to all people, and fatalities have resulted. In addition, some experimental non-lethal weapons can cause permanent damage to a person.

In science fictional worlds, the fatal possibilities of a stunning weapon are enhanced if the weapon is also used on various types of aliens. No one stunning weapon can work on every possible type of alien without killing some of them routinely.

A stunning weapon with multiple settings might deal with this problem. You might have your team leaders order phaser setting 1 for alien race A, and phaser setting 2 for alien race B. That will help, a little. But there will still be the possibility of killing when you don't intend to, and so you can't really use your non-lethal weapon routinely on folks you absolutely cannot kill for some reason.

What about a non-lethal 'smart weapon'?  It would scan the oncoming target and know exactly how much 'ooomph' to give to the stunning weapon. This would work to keep your stunning weapon stun-only. But the other implications of the technology must not be ignored.

You cannot, for example, have your 'smart weapon' stunner render aliens unconscious with precision, drag the unconscious alien to the sickbay, and have your ship's doc complain he can make no sense of the alien's physiology. Your smart weapon has already made sense out of that alien physiology in seconds. You can not have mystery aliens if you have 100% accurate non-lethal smart weapons.

In addition to the problem of your non-lethal weapon killing when not intended, there is an equal and opposite problem. You fire a stunning weapon at some raging maniac, and he doesn't go down. This is a major problem with real-world non-lethal weapons, and a reason why they are popular with policemen working in groups--- where some can carry more lethal weapons--- than they are for the lone person needing self defense. The last thing a vulnerable person wants to do is to get an attacker madder by firing an ineffective stunning weapon at them.

Your science fiction crew will, therefore, need lethal force as a backup, as in the Star Trek phaser which could be set to stun or to kill. Unless they are absolute pacifists in which case they will regularly experience casualties because of that stand.

What about non-lethal magical weapons/spells in fantasy worlds? Realism dictates that the 100% effective stunning spell/weapon would be unlikely. Now, if you have a fantasy world where only a tiny caste of wizards can do magic at all you might decide they can stun their enemies accurately--- but likely other wizards can defend against it. If, however, in your magical world any schoolchild with a magic wand can yell 'stupefy!' in an attempt to stun people, it is realistic to portray this stunning effort as variable in effect. The untrained child-wizard with indifferent level of Gifts might not achieve stunning effect at all, or do so only briefly, while the more trained person can stun effectively and for a sufficient amount of time to accomplish the goal.

Back to science fiction. If non-lethal weapons are so problematic, why have them at all? One major reason is the need to subdue people on board starships. You do NOT want to fire pistols on board the Enterprise and get the equipment damaged from stray bullets and shrapnel. A stunning weapon might at first be developed for shipboard use, and then migrate outward for situations where stunning is the only effective approach.

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Poetry Sunday: See, a Fishing Junk

See, a Fishing Junk
a sijo

See, a fishing junk floats to Kowloon
& I saw a typhoon drinking the harbor.
Stop, I said, do not drink all the water
For the sake of the fishing junk.

But the typhoon drank on
For the sake of relative humidity.

(c) Nissa Annakindt Dec. 13, 2012

One of my more recent poems, and thus not included in my book When the Opium Cactus grows. I will probably be sharing it in the poetry group Red Explosions Poetry Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/479819908761898 Please consider joining the group if you write poetry.

Shared on Poetry Pantry #158.

The kitten in the picture is Anthony, who decided to take a nap in the garbage can the other day. He is named after Saint Anthony, who found kitten Anthony and his sister when they went missing for a week. 

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Sunday Poem: malison d'etre

As I may have mentioned, I'm doing most of my blogging on Facebook these days, at the link given at the bottom of the page. But I still want to post my poem for Poetry Pantry at Poets United, and so I posted the poem on my Facebook and added my poem to the Poetry Pantry linky. And I thought I'd better post links to the poem here. Click on the poem title to read the poem.

malison d'etre


jonathan is a bat out
of hell
which explains his crispy singed
wings
and his
expression of perpetual exasperation
and why he sleeps
hanging over the heat register
on cold nights
he's working on a PhD
in social work
but what he really
wants is to
be a rock star
like michael jackson
& madonna
strangely enough he cant stand baseball
or hippoptamuses


(c) Nissa Annakindt 1990

This poem is included in my book Where the Opium Cactus Grows.



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Lonely on the Mountain, part 3

Now, years later and far out on the grass prairie, I was remembering and wondering what I could do that I hadn't done.

No matter which way you looked between you and anywhere else, there was a thousand miles of grass--- and the Sioux.

The Sioux hadn't come upon us yet, but they were about, and every man-jack of us knew it. It could be they hadn't cut our sign yet, but cut it they would, and when they did, they would come for us.

Lonely on the Mountain
Louis L'Amour
1980

This is the third installment of the beginning of Lonely on the Mountain, a western by Louis L'Amour, one of the most popular of American writers.

At this point the first-person narrator, Tell Sackett, brings us from his memory of troubled times of the past to the troubles of the present. He's out on the prairie--- we later learn his mission is to drive a herd of cattle to another Sackett in Canada--- and he is going through Sioux Indian territory--- and the Sioux are not feeling peaceable.

Putting the three sections of the beginning together, what most impresses me is the strong voice of his character. This is essential when you are using a first-person narrator. Such a narrator must show forth his personality and his individuality in the way he speaks. A bland first-person narrator just will not do.

Another interesting thing about 'Lonely on the Mountain'. The first section is first-person POV will Tell Sackett as the POV character. The next section is third-person POV with another member of the Sackett family as the POV character. He keeps hearing that Tell and the others on the cattle drive were killed by Indians. Later in the novel when Tell Sackett is found, we return to his first-person POV.

While this is not a common way of handling point-of-view in a novel, it works very well. Of course, L'Amour was a very experienced writer when he did it.

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Lonely on the Mountain, part 2

 Two years before, pa had set us to diggin' a well. "Pa?" I asked. "Why dig a well? We've got the creek yonder and three flowin' springs on the place. It's needless work."

He lifted his head, and he looked me right in the eye and said, "Dig a well."

We dug a well.

We grumbled, but when pa said dig, you just naturally dug. And lucky it was, too.

For there came a time when the bed of the creek was dust and the springs that had always flowed weren't flowin'. We had water, though. We had water from a deep, cold well. We watered our stock, we watered our kitchen garden, and we had what was needful for drinkin' because of that well.

*~*~*

Lonely on the Mountain
by Louis L'Amour
1980

This is the second installment of the beginning of this novel. L'Amour has his first-person narrator, Tell Sackett, give us a short word-picture of an incident from his boyhood. It shows what kind of person Pa Sackett was, which explains a lot about how Tell and the other Sackett brothers turned out.

This mini-flashback is risky at the beginning of a novel. L'Amour was at that time a very experienced writer. His first novel was published about 1950. The first book in the Sackett series was published in 1960, so he also had fans eager to hear some Sackett backstory.

But I think even if this had been the first Sackett book, this mini-flashback would have worked. In the voice of the first-person narrator, this mini-flashback is in a way a short description of the character--- not of his looks, but of who he was as a person.

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Lonely on the Mountain, part 1

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

Pa said that when I was a boy. There was a hot, dry wind moaning through the hot, dry trees, and we were scared of fire in the woods, knowing that if fire came, all we had would go.

We had crops in the ground, but there'd been no rain for weeks. We were scrapin' the bottom of the barrel for flour and drinkin' coffee made from ground-up beans. We' had our best cow die, and the rest was ganted up, so's you could count every rib.

from
Lonely on the Mountain
Louis L'Amour
published 1980

I've been doing a writing exercise that involves copying out about 300 words of the beginning of novels. This is the first 1/3 of the portion that I copied.

Louis L'Amour had a series, the Sackett series. The first book in that series was written in 1960. This one came along 20 years later. By this time Louis L'Amour was one of the most popular writers in the country. His skill with words can be seen here.

I found this section to be a very powerful opening, which I used for a model in my own WIP. The main character is William Tell Sackett, called Tell. He is featured in several of the Sackett novels and is a character I love.

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IWSG: From Insecure Writer to Insecure Facebook Author-Page Admin

This is my post for The Insecure Writer's Support Group, and the topic is how I went from being an insecure writer to being an insecure Facebook author-page admin.

We have all heard about how modern writers have to have a platform. And evidently that wooden platformy thing in my back yard does not count.

Many writers now have author Facebook pages in addition to their Facebook accounts. It's the kind of page a fan can 'like' rather that having to send in a friend request for. I knew I would make one some day. But I started a few other Facebook pages before I got the courage to make one for me-as-author.

One rule for Facebook page success was hard for me to learn: being controversial gets attention and so is good. My most successful Facebook page has the following title: We Support Traditional Marriage--- And We're Gay. Just listen to the sound of heads exploding over that one! And for all the controversy--- and the occasional hate troll who calls me a liar, moron and fraud and a few other words we won't get in to here--- I got some 545 'likes' on that page and a lot of supportive new friends.

An author Facebook page is harder especially if you don't have much published yet. I came up with the page-name: Nissa Annakindt, writer, Aspie, cat person. I decided that in addition to stuff about my writing, I would put up cat pictures--- I'm well supplied with cats--- and stuff about Doctor Who. And also stuff about Western fiction which is my current obsession.

One thing I do is post quotes from a book I'm reading, and then give the author and book title, and perhaps a bit of reaction. I thought that might be attractive to people who enjoy books and reading.

The hard thing about a new Facebook page is getting new 'likes'. It was SO frustrating at first! What I did was I 'used Facebook as' the page, and 'liked' a lot of pages I was interested in so I would have a good newsfeed. I then commented--- as the page--- on items of interest.

But it went so SLOW! I was stuck at 6 likes for the longest time. I complained that even my much-neglected Facebook page in Esperanto took off more quickly than that.

I keep working at it. I find new things to share, and comment on others' pages. I make memes--- like the one at the top of the page. I added my page to a list of author Facebook pages and blogs on a writer's group on Facebook. I'm up to 28 'likes' now.

But I've learned from my most successful Facebook page that it doesn't always start out quickly. You work at it for a long time, and it seems no one notices. And then, overnight, someone with clout does, and shares it with others, and things start to take off. And that can be scary, too. You have to learn to deal with trolls, among other things--- mentally troubled people who visit Facebook pages in order to hurl abuse at people. The first time that happened, I felt like crying. Now when I see the troll-fairy has left some hate-comments overnight, it's like taking out the trash--- just one more chore to deal with.

I would like to recommend, at this point, that when YOU have a Facebook page you set a strict troll policy--- when they resort to swearing and name calling and abuse, they are banned and the comment removed. The same with the persistently hostile. If people go to your page to disagree with you, expect them to be civil.

Anyway, that's what I have to say about my adventure into having a Facebook author page. I hope I've said something you can use. :)

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Young Writers and the Self-Publishing Trap

Before the internet age, the common trap for the young/beginning writer was the vanity press. A vanity press advertised in magazines, saying they wanted writers to submit to them. They accepted all novels, no matter how flawed. And then they ask you for money.

They claimed that was how publishing worked. You had to pay to get published if you wanted to be the next Norman Mailer.

So young writers paid, and ended up with a garage full of books that didn't sell because bookstores didn't carry vanity press books, and libraries wouldn't even accept them as gifts. And if the young writer mentioned that vanity press book as a writing credit, he was written off as an amateur.

Self-publishing today is not the same thing. They don't, as a rule, lie to you in order to sell you on publishing with them. And there are respected traditionally-published writers who self-publish now, such as Holly Lisle who has used self-publishing to get some of her old novels back into print. A very few writers have even found self-publishing an entryway to a writing career, as in Hugh Howey, whose self-published book 'Wool' won a traditional publisher's contract for a print book version.

But for the young/beginning writer, self-publishing can be a trap. Perhaps you participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and you finish a novel. Then you find out you can get it self-published. Perhaps people tell you that no one has a chance with the traditional publishers, you HAVE to self-publish.

Then it gets expensive. The self-publishers tend to sell you editing and proof-reading services, cover art services, perhaps special book promotion services. So even with a 'free' self-publishing option you end up sinking hundreds into self-publishing that first novel. And it doesn't sell, except to your mom and your cousin Bill.

So you panic and read a few articles on using social media to promote your book. You end up being a book-spammer--- putting your book promo up on message boards and internet groups, causing many to vow never to buy anything you write because of your rudeness. And you sell a few more books. Only your self-promoting is taking up all your writing time and you don't know when you will start your next book. Your energies are absorbed in selling this one.

This is a special problem for the teen writer. The teenager simply doesn't have the life experience to avoid making some glaring mistakes. And the skills of the teen writer are not what they will be after a few more years of practice. The teen-written first novel rarely can compete with books written by more mature writers.

This isn't to say that what the teen writer produces is worthless. Fantasy writer Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote a story as a teen that went on to become the start of her Darkover series--- a wonderful series she went on with for the rest of her life. But the teen-written version was not what got published. She re-wrote extensively at a more mature age, and this became one of her first published books. Years later when she had improved her skills still more, she was so embarrassed by the lack of quality of that version, called 'Sword of Aldones', that she retold that part of the Darkover story in a new novel 'Sharra's Exile'.

So--- you have your just-finished Nano novel in your hands. What do you do? Now, I'm not saying you can't use a firm like Lulu.com to make a few copies of the book, either print or ebook, to share with your writing friends. That can be fun. But DON'T at this point decide you are a published writer.

Your next task is to put that novel away for a few months and begin your second. Check that first novel again. How does it compare to what you are writing now? If you still think it measures up, look up some traditional royalty-paying publishers and submit. You will be rejected. Your second and third and fourth novel will be rejected too. But the rejection letters will get nicer.

As well as continuing to write, you must continue to improve your writing skills by reading the best books on writing, and doing writing exercises. 

When should you self-publish? I firmly believe that you ought to have something published in a traditional way before you are ready to turn to self publishing. It doesn't have to be a novel. In my case, I published a story in a national 'confession' magazine, several poems in small press periodicals, and a column in a local humor newspaper. I then had confirmation that I was able to judge accurately when something I had written was polished enough for publication.

 To get that publication experience you may have to experiment with writing forms that aren't really your writing goal. You may have to try out some small press publishers. You might have to do as I did and volunteer to write a column somewhere. Write thoughtful letters to the editor of your local paper and see if your letter gets published, and what the reaction is. Just find SOME way to get your writing tested by the real world.

The main thing is, DON'T fall into the trap of publishing an unpolished, beginner's novel through self-publishing and then self-promote the hell out of it. That is self-defeating. Be patient, and in time if you choose to self-publish, your self-published novel will stand out from the others in a GOOD way.


This blog post originally published on Facebook.
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Before you write, read

You may have heard it as 'A writer WRITES, always.' At least if you've watched the movie 'Throw Mamma From the Train'.  Only before you can write anything you need to put in many, many hours of reading.

Think of it like this. Writing is a foreign language. In order to speak this foreign language you must spend hundreds of hours listening to that foreign language being spoken. Only then will you be able to speak it.

Reading books is your way of listening to the foreign language. How many books have you read in your lifetime so far? A hundred? A thousand? Two thousand?

Think about the next hundred books you will read. What genres will you include? What authors? What non-fiction subject? What books will you read more than once? And how much more fluent will your writing be when you are done?

Nearly every successful writer out there was a compulsive reader of books before they ever thought of writing one of their own. This should serve as a caution to those who've decided they will be writers--- since it's a nice, indoor job and all--- even though they don't care to read on their own. You CAN'T get there as a writer by watching movies based on books, this isn't a grade school book report we are talking about but a way of life. And a way of life can't be faked.



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Confessions of an 'Egotistical' Insecure Writer

A Hostile Critiquer

I've always known I have writing problems. My self-esteem is so low that I have a hard time getting any words out at all. Because if you don't write your stories down, no one can tell you they are dreck. I also give up on perfectly fine writing projects because I falsely believe they are no good at the moment, and then can't get back into them when I realize how wrong I was.

But until I was so informed by a self-appointed hostile critiquer, I didn't know I was egotistical about my writing. Egotistical because I won't post excerpts of my writing on his Facebook critique group for him to grind into dust. As he does everything I say in my own Facebook group which is NOT a critique group.

So, I'll own up to it. I'm egotistical. I have my own way of writing--- though I experiment with variations--- and one thing I am not is someone who can 'write by committee'. Some people are that way. They may need a critique group to look over every word and suggest changes before they can proceed. If they can't get a good critique group, they will settle for critiques from random internet strangers. I can't understand working like that, but if it works for them....

I have my own way. Perhaps it's because I have Asperger Syndrome. I write. I find my own mistakes. I fix them if I can. Sometimes I can't. I may know that a certain scene needs more bits of description, but I may have done as much as I can along that line at the moment. I work alone toward a goal that perhaps only I think of as worth pursuing.

I don't want 'critiques' or writing instruction from self-proclaimed-brilliant small-press writers. I probably couldn't process the input from a first-class critique properly, and critique from random sources of varying levels of expertise just doesn't seem worth dealing with, for me. And then there is always the problem of attracting someone who will crush my already-almost-non-existent self-esteem--- for my own good, of course.

What I want is something I can use: reactions. Feedback. I mean, I want to be able to share a bit of my writing and see how people react to it. For example, I shared the basic premise from my WIP 'On Tejas Trails', about a girl who uses an amulet to be transformed into a male guise, and I got some good feedback that mentioned some Shakespeare plays in which females pose as males. Great, that was something I will probably work into the story.

I also got a few people who said the story sounded interesting. Were they merely being kind to poor, autistic me? Maybe. But I took it as encouragement and it helps.

If you are also an insecure writer, I encourage you to be 'egotistical', like me. YOU are the one I might think, for example, that you really need to fix some 'as-you-know' dialogue in your first chapter. But maybe you are not yet ready to deal with that input right now.
writer who can best tell what kind of help you need right now.

Know what feedback you are looking for at this moment and very specifically ask for it. If you have specific issues that you plan to deal with later--- perhaps you are a poor speller--- mention that you don't want feedback in that area at this time. I mean, if your major concern is whether your relationship between Tristan the vampire and Isolde the dwarf is believable, 1000 comments on your spelling errors will just get in the way of getting the feedback you really want.

And do feel free, when someone ignores your specifications on the feedback you want and gives you a rundown of your spelling mistakes, to tell that person to go to hell. Even if it is me. YOU are the one who knows what you need, and what just makes you feel defeated. Don't be afraid to speak up for yourself.

But what if you are a writer who is really bad? Aren't you cutting yourself off from a chance to improve when you don't invite critiques from all comers? No. Let's face it, a lot of critique comments are useful only as comic relief. Some person has heard some obscure writing rule and demands that everyone bow down to it even when the rule is not only invalid, but bizarre. I knew a woman once who was dead set against the use of the word 'and'. Didn't have much problem with a string of 4 adjectives in a row, but hated that word 'and'. Trust me, your writing will not be harmed by ignoring critiques like that.

It will also not be harmed by not asking for critiques prematurely, or in areas you are not ready to deal with at this time. Maybe what you need most right now is just some encouragement to believe in yourself as a writer. Because if you keep trying, your writing will keep improving. Whether the hostile critiquers like it or not.



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