All right. You’ve just had your first story appear in Cherished Magazine’s hallowed (e)pages. What do you do next? Well, if you’re a novice writer, you should promoted the hell out of it. Remember, the more people read your work, the better chance there is that someone influential will, if not “discover” you, at least remember your name, or better yet, give you a favorable review.

Part of a publisher’s job is making sure that your work gets read, but there are some things you can do as the author to help them do just that.

• Post a note to Facebook–This one is a no-brainer. Your family and friends should be among the first to help celebrate your success.
• Post a “Brag” in your local writing forum. Almost every writing forum has a “brag” section specifically designed to brag about your latest sale (and often a Shameless Self-Promotion forum for when your piece goes live). EDF has one. Use it!
• Write about it on your blog, or update your bio on your website. Don’t have a web presence? You should. How else are you going to get fan mail (it happens even to us novices)? More importantly, people know how to get a hold of you for interviews. When the computer Shaun Farrell from Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing uses to edit his interviews ate the one he did with the 1st place winners of WotF 25, he had to reschedule. Unfortunately, he could only contact me and Matt Rotundo, because the others didn’t have a web presence.
• Stumble it! There are a bunch of social networking tools you can use to help make sure your story gets read. StumbleUpon is a great one if you write flash fiction. Digg is great if you’ve written something the technical set might like, and there are certainly others. EDF gets a huge percentage of its traffic from StumbleUpon. We had a story read nearly a million times by their users. Can you imagine your work getting in front of a million users?
• Set up a “Google Alert” for your story name, your name, and common mis-spellings of your name. This will tell you when reviews start to show up (good Lord, don’t respond to them, especially the negative ones). When the reviews do show up, brag about those too. Remember, you’re not just an author, you’re a publicist, and people will expect a little self-promotion from you as long as you don’t get in their face about it.
• Offer yourself for interviews. This one is a little dicey for newer writers. If you’re on a first name basis with a magazine editor AND your the publication is especially prestigious,  it’s considered okay to send them a note alerting them of your success, and letting them know you’d be cool with answering a few questions from their readers. Often, editors are short of non-fiction, and your interview might fill a few pages.
• Write another story!  This is the beginning, not the ending. Keep pumping out those gems!

Tags: The craft

At EDF, we get a lot of “Dialogue only” stories. These are stories with zero description, just (at minimum) two characters talking to each other.

I can count on one hand how many of them we’ve ever accepted (and have fingers to spare).

The biggest reason for rejection? Both voices sounded the same. With dialogue only stories, you’re basically saying, as a writer, that you’re so good at writing dialogue that you don’t need all that mundane stuff like description, setting, and plot. You can do it all in the spoken word. Well, if you can’t even make two character sound different from each other, you’re in trouble. As an editor, I should be able to point to a random line of dialogue and say, oh, that’s character A speaking. I can tell because of his/her (way of speaking/accent/personality/etc).

Other good reasons for rejection are:

• You’ve inserted a random line of description at the end. If you have description at all, you need it everywhere. Otherwise it just looks like you tried to write a dialogue only story and failed.
• More than two characters. Two is hard enough. I’ve never seen a successful dialogue only story with three characters. The reader just gets confused.
• Info dumps. Just because it’s in dialogue, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
• The story sucks. A “clever” format like dialogue-only can’t save this.

Anyways, dialogue only pieces make for great exercises, but poor stories. Disagree? Prove me wrong. And then submit that proof to EDF’s slush pile.

Tags: EDF, The craft

I see this kind of thing a lot in the slush these days. The author eschews the actual story, and instead paints us an elaborate picture of what happened after the action. Obviously, this is common in flash, because often the inciting incident cannot be written in few enough words to qualify as flash.

We’ve published a few of these kinds of pieces, but often they just don’t work. There’s an insidious little trap that authors seem to fall into with regularity, and it is this: “When writing an aftermath piece, the situation described must be more interesting or powerful than the inciting incident”. Otherwise, the whole time you audience is reading the story they’re thinking, “wow that would have been cool to read about”.

To use a real life example, imagine you arrived at an intersection. Firefighters are hosing away stains on the street and you can just see a tow truck driving away towing something you just can’t make out. You ask a bystander what happened and he goes nuts, “Holy cow, I can’t believe you missed it! There was this wild elephant chasing a peanut truck and it ran into a wig factory and there was hair EVERYWHERE!”

You’d feel a little disappointed that you’d missed the action wouldn’t you? In an aftermath story, you’re going to have to overcome that with your readers.

How do you overcome it? Well, that’s really market dependent. In some markets (usually pulp markets) if your inciting incident was a bullets blazing, fist shaking brawl, you’ll never be able to overcome reader disappointment. They’ll want to read about that fight. However, if you’re targeting a literary market, they’re much more concerned with the emotional impact that that kind of violence would have. Give them a little angst and heartbreak, and they’re much more likely to forgive you for skipping the action.

Once again, it comes down to effective story placement. Know your market, and you just might be one of the ones who can pull off a perfect aftermath story.

Tags: The craft

So this is going to seem self-evident, but if you write a story in first person POV, you are, in theory, telling this story directly to your readers. It should work equally well on paper, or–and this is key–face to face.

So there’s shouldn’t be scene breaks because you don’t stop in the middle of a story you’d tell someone at a party (unless it was to go get a drink).

Equally, you don’t usually have “meta-narrative”. This means you don’t do an info-dump, then describe a scene, and go back to an info-dump. Remember, always picture yourself telling a story to a friend at a party. If they’d have to ask questions to follow your story, you fail.

That will be all for now.

Tags: First Person POV, The craft