Originally shared by Steve Turnbull
SURVEY FOR PEOPLE WHO READ …with a prize
I’m not selling anything, it really is just a survey. I want to know your reading habits, likes and dislikes. If you finish it you can also have a chance of winning a prize.
Feel free to spread it around… http://bit.ly/whole-story
Originally shared by Mike Reeves-McMillan
Today’s chapter from my nonfiction book in progress, Writing Short: The Craft and Commerce of Short Story Writing. This one is on staying motivated.
………………………………….
Unless you’re unusually good or unusually lucky, there will be periods of time when you’re not selling any stories. Perhaps long periods. How will you stay motivated?
Motivation and self-care for writers is a book in itself (which I may write someday), but in brief, you can stay motivated about writing (or anything else) in three main ways:
1. Remembering why you do it.
2. Setting goals you can control.
3. Separating your external success from your internal sense of self-worth.
Remembering why you do it
I’m not going to tell you why you should write. Sigmund Freud said that all writers write for wealth, fame, and the love of women, but Sigmund is pretty discredited these days (and obviously had some cultural blinders on there). Realistically, if wealth, fame, and love are your goals, writing is probably not the easiest way to achieve them, unless you’re one of a vanishingly small number of people who end up on the bestseller lists. Certainly writing short stories is no way to achieve wealth.
So what are some reasons to write?
– Because you can’t imagine not writing. This is the best reason, and will sustain you through times of no recognition better than any other.
– For the satisfaction of creating something.
– Because you enjoy the process.
– As a personal development exercise. This can be:
– To achieve something difficult, to master a hard skill.
– To gain self-insight.
– To improve your insight into people in general.
I’m sure there are plenty of other good reasons; those are the ones I can think of, probably because they’re among my reasons.
Setting goals you can control
I sometimes hear people say that their “goal” (or even their “plan”) is to win a contest, or make money in business, or something of that nature. These are not goals, as I define them; they are certainly not plans. They are aspirations.
An aspiration, for purposes of this discussion, is something you want to have happen, but that you can’t directly control. A goal is something you do have direct control over. I owe this distinction to Carrie Vaughn on an episode of the Odyssey Podcast (which is a good resource, by the way; it consists of extracts from guest author talks at the Odyssey Writing Workshop). She used the word “milestones” rather than “aspirations,” but the important point is the distinction between things you know you can control (write 250 words a day; submit a story every month) and things you can’t (sell a story to Asimov’s).
Now, if you’re intelligent with your goals, your chances of achieving your aspirations go way up. It’s sometimes said that success as a writer is a bit like being struck by lightning, in that it seems to happen randomly; there’s no sure-fire formula. For any supposed “formula” that exists, there are people who’ve followed it and not succeeded, and people who’ve done something completely different and have succeeded. But if success is being struck by lightning, then pursuing the right goals is like running around on a hill in a thunderstorm waving a crowbar above your head. Still no guarantees, but you’re maximising your chances.
I keep a web page of goals and aspirations, where I also track significant achievements (http://csidemedia.com/shortstories/goals-aspirations-and-achievements/). Here are the sorts of goals I’ve pursued:
– Read 12 books on writing craft in the course of a year.
– Make 52 short story submissions in a year.
– Write 15 short stories in a year.
You may well have come across the acronym SMART for setting goals, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely (or Time-bound). That’s how I set my goals.
Specific: not “I want to learn more about writing” but “I will read books on writing craft”.
Measurable: not just “I will read books on craft” but “I will read 12 books on craft”. That way, you know whether you’ve achieved the goal or not.
Attainable: I’ve adjusted the goals to what I think I can do. As it happens, I was wrong about being able to read 12 books on writing craft in a year, not because I overestimated my ability to read, but because I overestimated how many worthwhile books there are on writing craft. I ended up reading 9 books (and some partials that I gave up on because they weren’t very good). That’s still more than I would have read if I hadn’t set the goal, so I count it as a win.
Relevant: Talking to my mother more often is a laudable goal, but it doesn’t have much relevance to improving my short story writing. Writing more stories does.
Time-bound: The goals have a time period attached to them. Because the amount of time I have to spend on various activities can vary over the course of a year, I set a yearly goal, but you might set a daily, weekly, or monthly goal.
Because I am largely in control of whether I achieve these goals or not, they work well for motivation. I can track them and see how I’m progressing. Even when I’m not achieving any of my aspirations, like selling stories to particular markets, I’m still making progress with my goals—and I’ve set my goals in such a way that achieving them makes my aspirations more likely to be achieved. All else being equal, if I submit 52 stories in a year, I have 52 times the chance of making a sale than if I submitted one story in a year. I have infinitely more chance of making a sale than if I had submitted no stories.
Separating your external success from your internal sense of self-worth
As creative people, we tend to identify with our creations. Their success is our success. Praise for them is praise for us. Criticism of them is criticism of us. Rejection of them is rejection of us.
This is a formula for misery.
Obviously, there’s a sense of disappointment when we get the rejection email, and a sense of triumph when we get the acceptance. But if the rejection triggers off thoughts like “I’m worthless” instead of “that story isn’t a fit for that editor this month,” then we have a problem. Do all you can to separate your achievements from your self-worth.
This is a larger topic than I can possibly cover here, but in short, if receiving a rejection of a short story makes you seriously doubt your self-worth, consider getting professional help, and strongly consider not pursuing short story writing, at least until you have made progress on that issue.
Seriously, you will get more rejections than acceptances, no matter how good you are, and especially early on. If that’s going to cause you significant emotional problems, don’t submit.
On the other hand, absolutely do celebrate your successes. If you’re selling to the markets that you aspire to, that’s great! But if you aren’t, it isn’t terrible, and it isn’t because you have no worth as a human being. It isn’t even necessarily because you aren’t a good writer (though, realistically, you may not be, and you need to figure out whether that is the case, and, if so, whether you can become one). It may simply be because what you are writing is not what the editors you are submitting to are looking for.
Keep yourself motivated by remembering why you write, and tracking the aspects of being a writer that you can control.
http://csidemedia.com/shortstories/goals-aspirations-and-achievements
I understand this has just gone on sale at Amazon for 99c. It’s well worth picking up if you enjoy old-school space opera, smart, plucky, principled underdogs, and banter.
Looking for a source of tension in your long space journey? How about “something goes wrong with the onboard farm”?
Originally shared by ExtremeTech
How to feed ourselves while living in space.
I have many of the same struggles and tensions, and have come to much the same conclusions as Lisa Cohen articulates here. With the additional complication that I’m also male, so I’m extra-aware of challenging male-as-default and male-as-real-protagonist.
My basic strategy consists of writing consciously, and this collection, and otherwise mostly shutting up and supporting the voices of others who have less privilege than I have.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
This is the most demonically clever computer security attack I’ve seen in years. It’s a fabrication-time attack: that is, it’s an attack which can be performed by someone who has access to the microchip fabrication facility, and it lets them insert a nearly undetectable backdoor into the chips themselves. (If you’re wondering who might want to do such a thing, think “state-level actors”)
The attack starts with a chip design which has already been routed — i.e., it’s gone from a high-level design in terms of registers and data, to a low-level design in terms of gates and transistors, all the way to a physical layout of how the wires and silicon will be laid out. But instead of adding a chunk of new circuitry (which would take up space), or modifying existing circuitry significantly (which could be detected), it adds nothing more than a single logic gate in a piece of empty space.
When a wire next to this booby-trap gate flips from off to on, the electromagnetic fields it emits add a little bit of charge to a capacitor inside the gate. If it just happens once, that charge bleeds off, and nothing happens. But if that wire is flipped on and off rapidly, it accumulates in the capacitor until it passes a threshold — at which point it triggers that gate, which flips a target flip-flop (switch) inside the chip from off to on.
If you pick a wire which normally doesn’t flip on and off rapidly, and you target a vulnerable switch — say, the switch between user and supervisor mode — then you have a modification to the chip which is too tiny to notice, which is invisible to all known forms of detection, and if you know the correct magic incantation (in software) to flip that wire rapidly, will suddenly give you supervisor-mode access to the chip. (Supervisor mode is the mode the heart of the operating system runs in; in this mode, you have access to all the computer’s memory, rather than just to your own application’s)
The authors of this paper came up with the idea and built an actual microchip with such a backdoor in it, using the open-source OR1200 chip as their target. I don’t know if I want to guess how many three-letter agencies have already had the same idea, or what fraction of chips in the wild already have such a backdoor in them.
As Andreas Schou said in his share, “Okay. That’s it. I give up. Security is impossible.”
Originally shared by Adafruit Industries
‘Body Integrated Programmable Joints Interface’ Extends Your Hand’s Capabilities
We envision a machine-driven evolution of human body form and function, where the programmable nature of machines plays a crucial role. Robotic joints worn on the wrist turn into extra fingers so that a person acquires skills beyond what five fingers can offer, or performs “tri-manual” tasks with the machine joints.
Read more
Minor milestone: I currently have 12 stories out on submission.
Via Vanessa MacLellan.
Characters who create plot tension by stupid decisions or take no action to resolve their issues (but get handed the resolution anyway) are infuriating.
Originally shared by ****