Anthologies, and Why You Should Get On Board

There may be an Anomaly tomorrow, there may not.  In case there is not, I encourage any of you poets, writers, dreamers, helpers, the lot of you, great and small, go now to:

BooksThatHelp.org

There putting together an anthology of everything from haiku to flash fiction (did you know this was a thing?  Apparently, it is a thing) to short fiction (less than 7,500 words).  It's all coming down April 11th, and it all goes to help the victims of the quake/tsunami/aftermath that has brought a very real state of emergency to all of Japan.

I'm working on a contribution of my own, and it's taking most of my stolen writing seconds, which is why there may not be an Anomaly tomorrow.  The gist, if there was one, would be thus:

Amateur Writers

 Get on board with an Anthology!

In fact, apply to every one you can find.  It's a spectacular way to get your work and your name out there and to give yourself external deadlines that are much, much harder to cheat.

Be sure to read the anthologies afterward.  Learn from your peers:  they worked within the same limitations, with the same prompt.  Rarely will you find as good a comparison. 

Don't just look at their stylings, look at their perspective.  Drink deep of the rich spectrum of human imagination, and consider if you might not be dreaming with blinders on.

Don't count on editing advice here, unless you hand the anthology to your friends afterwards.  If you're looking for professional feedback, this is probably not your route.  If it's not crisp already, there's a good chance they've got other folks pounding down the door with more viable submissions.

Try to submit at least four a year if you can manage it.  You'll rarely be asked for more than 25,000 words, which is half a month's work according to some sources.  Most of the time, they're looking for 10,000 words or much, much less. 

Flash fiction is becoming huge, sometimes as short as 300 words or as much as 1000.  Want to stretch your writing chops?  Try squeezing character, plot, and setting into the space of half a page.  Now make it compelling without sounding like a bad independent film.

The length is irrelevant, the process alone will make you a better writer, deadline-keeper and all-around business person.  Keep yourself on task, follow up on the submissions that go through and especially read the anthologies you fail to get into to better understand why your piece didn't make the cut.

Go.  Get started.  Why are you still reading this? 

Oh, you want to know where to get started.  The answer is here:

• NewPages.com
• Places for Writers
• Samhain Publishing
• Wicked East Press
• Pill Hill Press

Google the rest.  I assure you, you needn't go far.  Anthologies are more varied and specific than anything shy of porn, so it's only a matter of time before you find one that's perfect for you.

I hope to crash into you on the anthology circuit.  And I hope you beat me to the cut.

Let the games begin!

The Longest Mile

Writing a novel is never half as bad as editing one.

If you've never endured the painstaking process that is content and style editing, there's a good chance you (and many writers like you) are much more fond of the early portions of the writing process:  spinning a web of intricate characters and bold new worlds, rotating the cultural perspective to unearth hidden truths obscured by our collective routine, and other such noble pursuits.

It's markedly more difficult to keep your idealism up when you spot the fifth consecutive typo of a simple, three-letter word. 

Make no mistake:  editing is a grueling process.  It involves combing your work page by page, word by word, letter by letter until every wrinkle has been ironed out enough for you to consider showing it to another soul (and have them rip your careful work to shreds). 

That said, good editing can be the difference between fanfiction and actual fiction.

Understand that, despite common conjecture, I don't mean to suggest that fanfiction isn't an equally valid means of artistic expression, merely that the titanic typographical catastrophes so often inherit in the genre can obscure any hope of viewing what may just be decent writing underneath.

There are really three levels of editing you need to concern yourself with, and the methods for each are different:

• Content editing - An overall sweep of your story, not the words on the page.  Fact-check yourself.  Do all the plot points still line up after you changed that one little scene halfway through?  Do you still like all the scenes you have?  How is the flow of the story as a whole?
• Style editing - Now we get to the wording:  what sounds good, what doesn't?  What feels awkward when you read it out loud?  Word choice, sentence structure and paragraph size are all suspect.
• Clean-up - Catching what spell-check missed.  This is the time-honored, time-eating process of combing for the "oops" moments throughout the work.  It's both the most trying kind of editing and the one kind you can outsource to some other poor, poor soul.  More on that in a moment...

Content editing is the easiest:  read the book cover to cover and make note of any pieces that don't add up, pieces you don't like or pieces you kind of what to add.  Jot them down.  You'll be writing them (and editing them) later. 

Try not to break your rhythm as you work your way through the book.  If possible, read the whole thing in a single sitting.  It's much harder for your brain to fill in the missing pieces that never made it to print if it doesn't get a break between.

If you're really worried about the pieces not fitting together right, outline the scenes as you reach them.  Keep it simple and high-level so you don't interrupt yourself too much, but don't use any of your own notes, only what's in the book.  You're essentially reverse-engineering your original story.  If your new outline adds up, it doesn't matter how much it does or doesn't match the original.

Style editing gets a lot harder, especially if you didn't have great English teachers in high school.  When asked how to fill the gap, most people will give the stock answer:  refer to Strunk & White's "Elements of Style," which is sort of like taking dating advice from a grad student in Psychology:  it will give you a lot of great, technical details that may or may not actually be applicable in the field.

And, in the wrong proportions, are likely to get you slapped without ever knowing why.

"Elements of Style" is a good backbone so that you don't fall on your face, but take it with a grain of salt:  it's a very academic assessment of the world of writing styles.  The truth is you'll learn a lot more about attractive writing styles by reading.  The trick then is reverse-engineering someone else's writing, and that's a whole other exercise entirely.

Which is why I recommend Leland's "Creative Writer's Style Guide."  It's less complete and technical than Strunk & White, but it's a much more practical, real-world approach to the problem.  In short, it's like taking dating advice from your best friend:  you may not know what to call it when she's projecting her deep-seated rage as an instinctual defense to the overbearing media-fueled patriarchy, but you will know which way to duck.

Understand that style is not a game of perfection; there is no "right," only what sounds good to you, what sounds good to your publisher and what you hope sounds good to a book-buying populace (and they may all sound completely different). 

This isn't said to make you feel better about your writing or to give fuel to those who will stubbornly refuse anyone's critique of their overuse of the word "egregious," but rather to reassure you that when you finally stop editing for style, there's a good chance you will still be unhappy with how it sounds. 

Reviewing a passage for style is like chewing the same piece of meat over and over:  no matter how good the cut, sooner or later, all the flavor is spent.  Be ready to set it aside and move on to a fresh piece before you feel 100% content. 

It can help to edit larger swathes at a time rather than line-by-line editing.  Thinking in pages and paragraphs allows your mind to consider those fall-flat sentences as merely the glue between two moments of awesome. 

And glue only tastes good when you're five. 

Lastly (and it should come last) is the clean-up.  Understand that content editing can create whole new scenes (or major shifts in existing scenes) and style editing will rewrite entire sentences and paragraphs, so if you spend time cleaning up typos and other miscues before now, you're just going to be doing it again at the end.  Save it for last.  You'll thank yourself later.

There are a number of tricks to spotting typos.  Reading pages backwards breaks up the natural habit of the brain to fill in pieces that may not fit, leading you to check if each word is what it should be.  Counting the commas in a paragraph can help the run-on weary.  If you've discovered your own ticks, it's not hard to devise a fitting find-and-replace search to check for them en masse.

(Personally, I like to jumble up verb endings (-ed, -s, -ing) for no particular reason, which makes it damn near impossible to spot a miscue from a proper gerund or plural noun)

There is, however, one way you don't have to worry about the tactic at all:  outsource.  Clean-up is the one part of your work that has a set right/wrong answer (whether you agree with the language or not is another thing), so it's the one part of the process you can hand to another soul.

And by "hand to" I mean "pay."

For those on a writer's diet saying "What?  Pay?  Doesn't that take monies?"  Yes, it does, and it's well-earned for any work over 70k. 

Consider the following equation:

1. You work a day job for, say, $15 an hour.
2. It takes you two weeks at 3-4 hours a night to finish editing by hand, after which time you never want to see your book or the color red ever again.
3. 3-4 hours a night for two weeks at $15 an hour comes out to $735 on the nose.  That is the amount you just paid to hate your own book.

Now consider that a dedicated temp worker can likely have the whole thing edited in about half the time if this is their primary income (6-8 hours a day), cost you no worry and may not even ask as much as you did for your 9-to-5.

So instead of blowing your own time for half a month and coming near to setting the book ablaze, you drop a lump sum on a friend or contract worker and get your book back, inked to all hell (including some errors you might not even have known were wrong), and suddenly the whole thing seems a whole lot cheaper. 

Consider also that a book you never finish costs you untold hours in the planning and writing stages.  To see it die in the home stretch because you can't stand to turn the pages anymore is far worse than hiring a contractor.  You can even follow the American business model and hand it to someone overseas if the cost has you crying.  They do have highlighters in Bangladesh.

Just be sure you know what you're getting before you go the outsourcing route:  send a sample to your potential hiree with a small sum and fixed time interval (say, $10 an hour for three hours).  Based on that, calculate your final cost, plus a little for the unexpected, and see if it still sounds like a good idea. 

If they're matching you for speed, there's a good chance you've found someone dedicated enough to muscle through.  It helps if you give yourself the same interval and compare speeds beforehand.  Just remember that you tend to nudge your own numbers, too.  If the timing is off, you at least have a segment of your work edited for all the cost of a dinner out. 

Naturally, if you're signing on with a publishing company, there's a good chance they have someone on staff already who's tasked with this very duty, so don't break your brain trying to hire a freelancer before you go sending your manuscripts out.   Mark the big ones as you do your style editing and then leave it to the professionals to comb out the rest.

One way or another, the editing has to get done.  It's a trade-off for how much better you'll feel when you read your own writing years later and only slightly cringe at how much worse it sounded then. 

Of course, if it doesn't sound worse at all, that's another problem entirely...

Research & Why It Doesn't Have to Suck

I've gone over the downsides of starting from scratch, as well as the advantages of not, but any writer who's worked in speculative fiction within the confines of a real-world frame knows that it has its own dark, looming specter:

Research.

To write in the real world, you first need to know the real world, and that means more than a five-minute Wikipedia search.  If you want fiction to be unique and compelling, that requires finding something new and different within the world we all live in every day.

Unfortunately, with the Internet reporting on every compelling story as it breaks, the world of the 'new' is shrinking.  That means you have to dig, and digging means dirty hands and aching shoulders.

You get the idea.

But if you find writing to be work enough, it's hard to have the energy left for something as in-depth and action-bereft as research.  It instantly conjures up imagery of long nights in the dark corners of a dusty library hoping to beat a deadline for the coming morning's class.

Research is reading but without all the fun.  It's the very antithesis of the type of writing you're trying to do:  it's uncollated, unorganized, scattered and buried amidst pages upon pages of dry, unentertaining text.  Like the Silmarillion.

...Okay, that was low, I admit it.

But there are ways to make research into something less than an exercise in personal torture:

1. Look for stories, not just figures.

That means not just looking at the disease but looking at those who have it, looking at those who've studied it, or where it all began.  It means not just looking at the chemical reaction but all the factors that can impact it, imaging the lab around it and the poor, sleep-deprived grad student who made the discovery by accident.

Stretching the story beyond the numbers not only makes it a more interesting read, it can help you arrange what seem like stranded pieces at first into one coherent series of causal events.  Even better:  the very same scenes you dream up to piece together the facts and figures can easily turn into scenes in your finished work.

2. You're not paid by the citation.

Don't go overboard.  Most stories only need one thing to stray off the beaten path to create a new and difference sense of adventure.

A good rule of thumb is to have one true-but-obscure element per major pivot point in the story.  In many stories, that means one to two at the most, in others, three or four.  Either way, you're not needing to unearth miles upon miles of data.  Find two or three zingers and build off of how they react to a hypothetical environment.  You'll save yourself a great deal of work, and avoid risking having your reader sit through an accidental dissertation just to get it all in print.

3. If you have to be certain, ask a human being.

People can often answer your questions faster (and more completely) than any Google search.  If you're finding a lot of scattered references or aren't sure the pieces fit the way you think, find someone in the field and ask.  Even a quick email will suffice (though beware of forums, where wild conjecture abounds).

And remember, if you do find an expert who helps you make a breakthrough with the work in any way, be sure to credit them.

4. Don't stop at "it can't be done."

The trouble with research is that it's much more often responsible for shattered dreams than uplifted ones.  The very reason we so often crave fiction is that fact, for many of us, is often secondary to what we can imagine.

What that means is that you should expect your research to nullify and otherwise block many of your original designs.  It isn't enough to know that it can't be done:  understand why.

Not only will the answer likely lead you to another solution (or at least help you avoid running into a similar dead-end), the very search for that answer can make for compelling dialog inside the work itself.

Have your characters follow the same patterns (possibly in reverse) searching for an explanation; for the source.  The resulting red herrings not only provide added suspense and drive for the characters, they also create a more complete perspective on the research you've done to assure more critical readers that you've considered all possibilities.

5. You're never going to please everybody.

The more obscure the data, the better the chance for conjecture and misconception.  Somewhere, somehow, someone will disagree no matter how much research you do.  In fact, the more facts you bring together, the higher the chance someone will claim you haven't any basis in fact at all.

Aim for your majority audience, and don't sweat the minor details.  When you're satisfied that the major pivot points have been verified, it's time to get to writing.  If you're not sure that the historical or scientific pieces fit together the way they do in your head, have a friend read over your work once it's done.  I reiterate, do this always.

Lastly, remember that you're writing a story, not a doctoral thesis.  Fanboys aside, there's only so much work you can put in before it's time to focus on the parts of the story that will make it engaging and entertaining for everybody.

And that's a fact.

Three's Company - The Concept of the Spare in Romantic Fiction

If there's anywhere that writing truly is a numbers game, it in the characters you create.

It's a common misconception to believe that most romantic stories are about two people. In point of fact, most of them are about at least three people, and oftentimes more. Writing those characters off as "fluff" and "comic relief" is all well and good, but subtract them, and you'll soon notice just how vital some of them can be.

The idea of a "spare" or a "wedge," the front fork of your literary tricycle, is ancient, tested and largely understated. A couple searching for love in an environment that seems hell-bent on tearing them apart is compelling, certainly, but unless you're up for a lot of internal monologue that ends with a rush of "meh," you need a secondary agent.

Enter the spare.

Most stories, even love stories, tend to focus on one particular character at a time. Even if you wrap several such stories together, the reader's attention is better kept if it clings to someone with whom they can form a deeper, more lasting relationship (and not get motion sick when trying to shift perspectives without a clutch).

When you tear lovers apart or create obstacles to keep them from being a sensible, realistic, and ultimately boring match, you introduce a unique problem: how is the side of the pair you're focused on going to live out his or her angst without pages upon pages of what amounts to well-phrased LiveJournal monologue?

The answer, as you've doubtless seen countless times, is the spare. 

A friend, a similarly-cursed companion, even an unimpressive enemy all make spectacular spares.  The spare travels with the lead on their quest to find their beloved again. They can be fonts of insight, comic relief or purely a shoulder to cry on.  

The more base examples serve as foils against whom the hero looks all the more bold and bright by comparison.  They stumble, they stutter, or are shown as less moral, less stalwart, less resolute or less open-minded.  It helps establish that the hero is an uncommon individual, set apart not by their circumstances but by some unique, intangible essence growing within them. 

Others are the guides and guardians, taking the hero through their trials until they are worthy of the object of their affections. You can even combine the two, revealing the guardian's light-hearted side or giving the clumsy sidekick a sudden moment of clarity.  These sorts of spares are either killed before the end credits or else happen upon a soulmate of their own somewhere off to the side of the epilogue, one with whom they can begin a sensible, realistic and ultimately boring relationship for all time.

From a technical perspective, the spare turns weighty monologue into witty dialogue; both a quicker and more emotional venue for outing the hero's feelings and devotion throughout the adventure. It also gives the audience and the author a mouthpiece in an otherwise heavily-biased circumstance.

Consider Romeo & Juliet, one of the classics, and notably lacking a true spare. Both sides of this torn and tangled affair are so busy being swept up in the melodrama of being teenagers forbidden to date that there's very little grounding the story in reality, giving it a very fairy-tale feel (which, being as it's Shakespeare, may well have been the point).

The spare adds a new dimension. If Mercutio had remained decidedly un-run-through till the end of the work, not only would Romeo have had someone to help rein in his astronomical hopes and dreams, but the open gang war happening all around them might have garnered more than passing mention as "gee, our parents sure are cooky."

As it stands, he did his best.

There's a flighty quality to personal romance that can leave some readers in the dust if they haven't wholly bought into the character's own affections yet.  Just because your character is head over heels doesn't mean the reader is.  Yet.  Selling someone on the love-conquers-all motif helps if you keep it grounded in the beginning, which is precisely where having a spare becomes so valuable.

The spare is the friend telling you you're crazy, and then helping you plan the stunt anyway.  He's there to slap you on the back of the head when your heart gets carried away and leaves your head behind.  The spare doesn't stop you being hopeful and romantic.  To the contrary, he lets you make a fool of yourself, and then is there to call you as much.

The idea of the spare is an insertion of the audience itself into the work.  When you leave someone alone to hide in the bushes and stare at a girl in a nightgown gazing up at the stars, a modern audience is more concerned with "Is he a stalker?" than "What light through yonder window breaks?" 

Having a friend there (or one to confront him later in retrospect) to chide him for being creepy lets the audience feel validated (and rules out for them the chance that you yourself see no issue with watching a girl on her balcony at night while hiding in the hedgerow).  Likewise, as the story progresses, the friend can start to slowly see what makes the two leads such a great match, hopefully in time with your audience's own come-round progress.

It allows you to seed a hopeless romantic without letting the entire story be seen through their star-dusted lens.  The spare keeps at least one element of the work firmly grounded in reality, leaving you room to at once hold both an optimistic (romantic) and skeptical (realistic) perspective on the exact same scene, which changes the voice from lovesick idealist to weathered, practiced dreamer, something this post-fairy-tale generation has come to crave.

In the game of subversion, it's your way of still telling a modern fairy tale of true love while at once denouncing fairy tales as hopelessly unrealistic and silly, which lets you catch both sides of the reader's brain no matter where they rest on the optimism spectrum. 


But the grounding element isn't just to the benefit of your audience:  often it's the only thing keeping your hero alive.  In extreme cases, your idealist would walk into spinning blades to get to their love.  Such devotion (read: "obsession") often makes them oblivious to everything else in the world, danger being chief among the things they overlook.

You can keep your hero supernaturally dedicated to their quest, their journey, their one true love, whatever the object be, while at once letting the spare be the one to help them through the very real-world obstacles that lie between, often gaining audience sympathy when his or her efforts go completely unnoticed. 

When your lovers are kept apart not by environmental factors but by their own personal inability to drop the pretense and start humping like bunnies, the spare becomes a catalyst; a somewhat self-interested interloper dedicated to the two lovers becoming a couple for whatever reason (often just so the tension in the room will go down). 

Even the matchmaking spare works to shatter the mega-romatic air that we often wrap our own relationships in by becoming the jarring element that pushes one half of the pair or the other over the edge; in effect, the spare distracts them from their own issues long enough for base instinct to take over. 

The chief weapons of the matchingmaking spare are blunt admission and canny misdirection.  These are the sort to set up a clandestine meeting between the loves, writing each a letter posing as the other until they find themselves alone and confused somewhere romantic and/or a small, confined space in which they can be easily trapped by the now-snickering spare. 

When the only barrier between two people is their own awkwardness, the spare is often the one to grab the hero by the ankles and forcefully huck him or her through said barrier and into the unsuspecting lap of their intended.  ...At times, literally.

The spare is prime for comedic timing and fourth-wall-stretching commentary to keep your romance from feeling too cheesy, or to help delay the moment of gushy goodness for as long as possible, to make it all the more rewarding when even the loudmouthed cynic in the room is forced to admit it's a little cute. 

The spare gives your audience someone to connect with other than the main characters, so that even those long past sparking their first love or not caught up in finding their own can still delight in the third-person onlooker's perspective with a real and waiting shell standing there, smirking on the sidelines.

Which means, done right, the spare can turn out to be most beloved character of all.

Kingdom of the Sun - A Case Study in Character Introduction

The rusted latch squealed its objections¹ as Marcus turned back the deadbolt.  It scraped along the warped wood of the door, leaving no bastion between him and the unmistakable evidence of pure squalor lying in wait just beyond the portal.²

He set his keys on the old dresser as he passed, his brief reflection in the mirror mired by the grime clinging to its edges with unusual tenacity.  His coat he let fall on the couch, sending up a fresh cloud of the same old dust as it landed heavy on the fraying fabric.  Himself he threw into a chair by the window³, letting the tinted sunlight blanket his face in the otherwise shaded room.

Overcome by the wear of the day, he rested his head back against the cracked leather and shut his eyes, drinking deep the meager warmth from the window.  His mind echoed a peaceful chord in tune with the hum of the overhead light as it flickered in tireless vigil of his once-great private kingdom.⁴

A sharp 'ping' rang like a bell in the small room, waking him from his dream-filled stupor.  The computer on his desk, the one paragon of the modern age set against an empire of rotting antiquity.⁵  The leather of the chair groaned in time with his own unkind utterances as he leaned forward to flip the power switch on the monitor.

It buzzed to life, its own hum much higher and more shrill than that of the quiet overhead light.⁶  The small white box in the corner held the name of the offender; the one whose coming had shattered Marcus' meditation so abruptly.  fahrenheit104.  April's idea of a joke.⁷  The boys like it, she told him once.  He had never wanted to know.

"u there?"⁸ she asked, the cursor marking the time before he made his reply.

"I'm here," he typed back, cringing at the chime of her immediate response.

"good," said the box,⁹ "get to chance & one-eleven right away.  i'll meet you there."

Marcus chuckled at the exchange.  How a girl¹⁰ who couldn't be troubled to spell out a three-letter word always found time for things like 'one-eleven' remained a mystery to him.  It made him wonder if she might have a compulsion against calling a thing by its proper name.  It would explain why she still called him "Sarge"¹¹ despite his promotion to captain years ago.

It had become more his name now than "Marcus" anyway.  It was a funny thing to be known only by what you did.  It made him appreciate all the meaning wrapped up in a name like "Smith," but despite the history, Marcus' family had never truly made much of anything, least of all of themselves¹².

Cutting the monitor off with a 'click,' Marcus struggled to his feet and moved through the room to gather up his things, brushing a fresh layer of dust off the back of the coat before swinging it over his shoulders and grabbing his keys.

He paused at the door, casting a last long, lingering look¹³ over at the small, shabby apartment behind him.  Dust kicked up in his exit now danced in the beam of light from the window, twinkling in the sun like specks of falling snow.¹⁴  The sight of it made him think of Christmas and the peace of winter; the stillness that chill lends to all the world.

His mood then took a turn for the macabre¹⁵ and Marcus quickly cleared his throat to scatter the encroaching silence, opening the door with another pained squeak of metal before shutting it behind him and leaving the sunlight alone to warm the space he had left behind.

---

Footnotes:

1: Personification, right from the start. The deadbolt is alive and complaining. This sets the tone for the entire apartment to have a life of its own, turning it from a cold building into a familiar friend or a waiting pet.

2: Already we've learned two things: that Marcus lives in relative squalor, and that he needs some protection against it. Whether these are the normal ravages of being poor or simply the shame of living in a shabby apartment remains to be seen.

3: Marcus tosses himself much like he did his effects, again putting him in line with the objects in the room, making him as lifeless and discarded as they are alive and sympathetic. Both serve to tie him to the apartment, which means everything in it becomes a symbol of some part of him.

4: Sunlight through a grimy window is now this man's greatest treasure. The line also implies that he had a more comfortable or more impressive life once, and has since fallen to these sad circumstances.

5: Furthering the "kingdom" analogy, which in turn colors the reader's impressions of how Marcus sees his apartment. This is his palace, shabby though it may seem. It again makes it a kindred spirit, something he cherishes in spite of its blemishes.

6: The discordance of the computer makes it stand out from the room. This is the first unwelcome object we've seen, which gives the reader an idea of Marcus' opinion on it and perhaps technology in general, given the statement on the room at large.

7: Notice how the joke isn't explained. We leave it to the reader to wonder what the meaning might be. It might be as simple as April implying that she's "hot," or it might have a much deeper meaning somewhere in their joint past. Either way, we know Marcus knows, which tells us something about their relationship.

8: In one letter, we've established several things about April using the cultural connotation of typing "u" to represent "you." She may be young. She may be tech-savvy. She may text constantly. She may not have any love for outdated conventions and old etiquette. Contrast this with Marcus' "antiquity," and we already have the setup for a tried-and-true dichotomy of contrast between them.

9: Objectification again. We have uplifted objects and whittled down people, causing everything to meet in the middle. Alternatively, it could be seen as Marcus' opinion on talking through instant-messenger versus a voice or in-person conversation; another implication that he may have a certain reluctance to using technology.

10: Marcus, at least, refers to April as a girl, which clues us in to a discrepancy in their ages, with Marcus being the older. Were she the same age or older, she would be a "woman," and were she much much younger, she might be a "child," but "girl" denotes a fairly distinct "younger-than-me" contingent of the female population. In context with the other clues, we might be able to start guessing at her age.

11: Again drawing on the cultural consciousness: "sarge," especially when paired with the reference to captain later in the sentence, is short for sergeant, a title that is uniquely military or police-related. Sarge is the more informal variety, which again gives us an angle on April's irreverence for formality or hints at a more intimate (though likely not romantic) relationship between the two characters.

In addition, sergeant in all its forms is a lower rank, often associated with front-line leadership or training new recruits, which both gives us a glimpse of Marcus' roughneck background and allows for a possible former professional relationship between him and April, especially given that she still calls him "sarge" despite his promotion. All that from five little letters.

12: The sudden divergence of topic gives the impression that Marcus' own mind is wandering, which suggests either he's tired or that his brain is taking whatever small respite it can before heading out to his next assignment. The latter remark about his family establishes a sizable chip on his shoulder: breaking a familial trend of never amounting to much, which, given the current state of his apartment, he may still be struggling with himself.

13: Alliteration can add humor, a sense of music or a sense of haste to a sentence. Overdoing it will seem goofy to your reader, but a quick three- or four-part sequence can lend a sense of quickened pace or poetic rhythm to your work. Useful, but be warned: switching words to line up an alliterative march can alter the meaning. Intention and impression are still paramount; poetry comes second.

14: Note the contrast: the sunlight was the only source of warmth, yet now it's being used to illuminate "snow." It may lead to implications on how fragile the things Marcus clings to can be (like snow in warm sunlight), or it may simply be another diversion of his mind; a symbol of a memory from some significant winter.

15: Notice we again don't explain exactly where his mind is going. Given the end of the last sentence, there's a certain allegory for the grave arising from an otherwise peaceful recollection. Putting the two together, the reader might get the impression that Marcus lost something precious in the wintertime, like a loved one. Add the significance of family and Christmastime (there's that cultural consciousness again) and an already tragic event can become devastating.

All this may just be laying the tracks for a later reveal about a dark moment in Marcus' past. For now, the reader can only wonder at what set him off and hurry after him in hopes of learning the secret.