Category: Writing

One of my favorite things in the world is getting so into a scene I’m surprised when I realize it isn’t the real world. I just wrote a thunderstorm, and I’m surprised and disappointed to find it’s a beautiful night.

Ahead a chapter on the Nine. Had a lot of fun with this one.

My ambition to hit ~2k everyday is startling difficult. It’s not the 2k, it’s the everyday part. I write in fits and spurts. I did something like 4k today, but on many days I struggle to hit 300.

I tell myself a few things.

First, hitting wordcount is more important than not deleting wordcount later. This is a practiced skill or developed muscle. It’s more important to make progress than make good progress, for quality can be checked and revised later. Besides, a lot of the time what I do is fine, and it’s only my own poor estimation of what I write that is the problem.

Second, I tried the only writing when inspired before, and it doesn’t work. Everyone who writes will tell you this. All the great authors who write about writing agree. You’ve got to move the cursor.

Third, I have no idea what you people want.

Fourth, I’m running out of time. I’m coming to the end of this experiment of mine soon, and my attempts to stave it off are growing weak. I’m running low on money and time, and I won’t be able to do this full-time much longer.

Often I set deadlines for myself and ignore them because I’m the one setting deadlines. This isn’t one of those deadlines. This is harsh reality, and if I don’t make a lot of progress and soon, this is all going to end. Then it’s back in the other place.

You know that feeling of last-minute panic? I’ve been getting a vague anxiety for a while, and that’s a diffuse, disrupting terror that makes progress difficult. That’s falling away. Now I think of bank statements and rent payments, and if I don’t get things done, my bank will get me. I’m not in dread of some vague anything; I know I’m running out of time. And that’s focus. I’m not going out with a half-assed “I gave it my best” when I darn well know I didn’t. This little fantasy of mine is getting both buttcheeks of motivation, and boys and girls, I do squats.

For Mortal Man

BC was lovely. I found a small cabin on the Koutenay Lake on Air BnB and went up to get away from the noise in my apartment. Things are not good here. The cabin was wonderful, and I had some time to do some detached thnking.

My problem is I’m not working hard enough, because I’m focused on working right. This is half of true. Working smarter not harder is definitely a good idea, but the other half is that if you don’t know what a smarter way to work is and you stop working to look for it, you aren’t getting anything done.

I have an issue where I stop writing entirely until I figure out a problem or plot hole, and while that makes sense, it also doesn’t get anything done. I’m going to move past that, and I’m going to do it by writing something that doesn’t have to be right. I’m talking of course about fanfic. I’m going to write something big, dumb, and fun, and I’m doing it just to keep the fingers moving. There will be no pauses. Other stuff can be worked on as well, and hopefully will, but the keys are going to keep clicking. You can find Nine for Mortal Men Doomed to Die here at AO3. And BTW, I know there’s a comma after men, but I don’t like commas in titles.

Finished the Akira cycle again, and it’s amazing. Going to hit Brian Sanderson’s The Way of Kings for my next fun book and Robins’s The Story of the Lamp for my vegetables book. Robins was a product of his time, but there’s good information there.

People who tell you never to use the passive voice are wrong.

There are uses to the passive voice and several problems. Starting with the advantages, the first and most important one is that it helps the writer control the subject.

A) Bob had been murdered.

B) Someone had murdered Bob.

The first has Bob as the subject. Bob’s widow or his mother probably aren’t thinking about the murderer. Likewise, if A or B is a narrative sentence and the murderer is unknown, putting the murderer as the subject of the sentence is both unnecessary and redundant. The verb murder implies a murderer, and the word someone contains the least information possible. So by saying ‘Someone had murdered Bob’ the author has accomplished redundancy and uselessness together in one sentence. There was no redeeming value in brevity either.

That’s the second point of use in the passive voice. Sometimes it allows for greater brevity.

C) Alice was adopted.

D) Alice’s parents had adopted her.

You don’t need the parents because if someone gets adopted, it’s implicit that they were adopted by their parents. That’s how adoption works.

Furthermore, if the narrative is about Alice and the consequences she faces as being adopted, C makes her the subject as in A above. D meanwhile moves the focus to the parents. If the narrative is about the parents, good. Use D. If the narrative is about Alice and her adoption isn’t the focus, but rather the effects that adoption had on her, use C.

The passive voice also allows for focus on the attribute the action having been done and not the action itself. Suppose you’ve got a supernatural mystery, and murdered victims can’t move on until they find out who did it. Murdered Bob is going to be affected by the murder for the rest of the book, or at least his arc. The murder itself may be over and done quickly. If Alice is a young child, the aspect of being adopted is huge to her worldview. She’s different from her siblings. Her parents might love her different. She might not really be in the family. These matters are huge, and if those matters are the crux of Alice’s narrative, they matter. If Alice was adopted before she can remember and has never met her biological parents, the adoption itself might rarely enter her mind. Her status as one who is adopted, not a real kid but an adopted one (I’ve heard this used like this), may affect her worldview and identity in fundamental ways.

In character, it is sometimes used to escape responsibility.

E) I hurt Jane’s feelings.

But in passive voice, the I can be removed.

F) Jane’s feelings were hurt.

If the speaker doesn’t want to take responsibility for hurting Jane’s feelings, the passive voice is a good way to say that because it takes the speaker out of the sentence.

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The disadvantages of the passive voice are a lack of intensity and that it’s usually more wordy to convey the same information.

G) The tree had been knocked down by lightning.

H) Lightning knocked the tree down.

G is a boring sentence. It lacks immediacy and tension. H is an action. If the lightning storm is going on in the narrative, the author probably wants the reader to care about said lightning storm, and therefore the more interesting sentence is H.

Likewise for the same information conveyed, the passive voice usually requires more words.

I) Jane shot Beth with the gun.

J) Beth had been shot by Jane with the gun.

I is clearly shorter and conveys exactly the same information. If the action is meant to be important, I has more impact. If the action is not meant to be important, I gets the information out there faster so the narrative can move on to something that is important.

Most of a narrative isn’t shocking detail or character description/exposition but rather plot. Events are occurring or characters are talking and thinking. In those cases the narrative is usually served by making the flow quick and snappy, getting to the exciting bits and making getting there as interesting as possible. Thus most of the time the active voice is a better choice. But a lot of people say never use the passive voice, and this is wrong. If there was never an excuse to use the passive voice, it wouldn’t exist.

There’s another set of uses in instructions and general nonfiction that flows from the subject discretion of the first point.

Step 1: Turn the knob to the left.

Step 2: The knob should be fully turned to the left.

By keeping the sentence structure and the subjects/objects unchanged a reader doing a complex task may find reading the instructions easier. This comes up a lot in product manuals, but it’s not really connected to writing fiction.

To enroll in the Kindle Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited the book needs to be a part of Kindle Select. This means Amazon has exclusive digital distribution rights. You cannot enroll in KDP Select if more than 10% of the book is available digitally anywhere.

KDP is just Kindle Direct Publishing, and that is just the term for Amazon’s publishing arm. It’s basically self-publishing as the author is responsible for editing, cover, layout, etc, but Amazon does distribution and point-of-sale. KDP does not require exclusivity.

I’m not sure if I want to use that service (KDP Select). I like putting my stuff online for free, but that doesn’t pay the rent. Can’t cash checks against exposure and frankly, I’m not getting a whole lot of exposure. I’m not sure what to do.

I’ve set up an author page at Amazon, Matthew Miller. I’m not entirely sure what to put in there.

One of the reasons people post so much politics on Twitter, Facebook, etc. is that we have these platforms to spread our voices, but we don’t always have something to say. Let me pick on myself. I would like to tell people about writing, the worlds, the process, etc, but a lot of that honestly isn’t that interesting. It’s not even ‘you don’t want to know how the sausage is made’ but rather ‘I spent an hour figuring out how to move Helen into the same room as her siblings.’ This is the stuff I love. This means something to me, but you, as readers, probably aren’t that interested in my thought process, and you’re certainly not as interested as I am. Blocking out a scene can take days as an extreme but not infrequent case. Hours are typical. Especially if the scene isn’t otherwise clear, and I’ve gotten pushback on it. YOU don’t want to read six hours of me thinking about who’s in which chair.

I do want to keep the blog/social media going. And thus I’ve got to say something. So I jump to my B-line of thoughts, and most of that isn’t that interesting either. I just tweeted about beans and rice because I’m hungry. (Breaking news: Matt hungry). I could tweet about the gym or the weather. None of that sounds particularly intriguing.

So we drop to the C-line of thought: politics and global finance. If you want engagement, you need to put an emotion behind the post, but most of those C-line thoughts aren’t emotional. The stuff that really gets me going is the A and B lines, which is writing, eating, and the job. So it’s back to politics, and if you want to put an emotion in there, you find something to be outraged about or something to fanatically defend. Cynically, those are raging and virtue signalling.

I don’t have a solution. The Amazon page is pretty lean.

Working hard at Bedtime Stories. Too cold for motorcycling.