Write more

When it comes to writing novels only one thing is easier—knowing I'll finish. I have a confidence there where there used to be gnawing uncertainty that I might be wasting my time. Now I know that I can probably crank out two a year if I have an outline for them. That's vastly comforting. But there are other parts to the writing process that will never get easier. 

1. Revising. There aren't any shortcuts. I revise quite a bit before my agent and editors take a peek, and then revise more after they give me their comments. I don't think anyone writes the Golden Draft...maybe I'll produce a copper or bronze one someday. :)

2. Waiting. Once I send work to my agent, he sends it out on submission...and I wait. Sometimes the wait isn't all that long, but sometimes it's months. I try to deal with it by writing more. And if there's a deal, then there's another wait on the contract (which is where your agent truly earns his money and is worth every penny of his commission). Sometimes that wait is only a month or so, but I've also had to wait close to a year because of problems with boilerplate contracts, and my agent had to take on Viking Death Ships full of lawyers. (Luckily, he ate his spinach.) And after the contract is finished and you sign it, there's another wait for the money to arrive—anywhere from a couple of weeks to three months, depending on where it's coming from. If there isn't a deal, well then...

3. Rejection. It still happens. Getting published once isn't a golden ticket to getting published again, and getting published in the U.S. doesn't mean other countries are going to hand over bags of money for translation rights. One market will look at my series and say "Gimme!" and another will look at it and say "Meh." The answer to rejection, like waiting, is to write more, because otherwise I might chew glass. 

4. Fear of #3. Even though I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm capable of writing publishable books, I still look at my writing at times and conclude that it isn't good enough. "Whine," I say to my wife, "whine whine this sucks whine whine." She tells me to shut up, I do, and write more. It's the only thing that can possibly make the sucking stop, after all.

Right now I'm enjoying coffee with this seasonal creamer in it—it's called marshmallow mocha. Mmm. Hope you're taking advantage of the season's opportunities for warm, comfy drinks. And writing more.

Platform Building with a Pug

There's a pretty cool post over at SFWA by Victoria Strauss about gettin' published: It's not a crap shoot. She addresses three assumptions made by grumbling, rejected writers, and while I urge you to click over and read her original post, I'd like to piggyback on those assumptions based on my own recent experience.

1) First assumption: All manuscripts are on equal footing in the marketplace. As she says, that's completely untrue, and I'm not talking about anyone's writing but my own. The two books I wrote, submitted, and had rejected before I wrote Hounded were not all that great, though I thought they were okay at the time. Only with experience and hindsight did I see that they deserved to be rejected. Yet I don't regret writing them; I learned a lot in the process and they got me to a much better place in my craft. If you're on submission right now, write the next book while you're waiting; it'll probably be better than the one you're shopping around. (It worked for me.)
2) Second assumption: The industry doesn't want new writers. Not sure how anyone can believe this one. I just read a great debut by Mark Hodder called The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack. And my fellow inductees into The League of Reluctant Adults, Sonya Bateman and K.A. Stewart, came out with their debuts this year. I'm obviously a new writer, and there are plenty more on deck...so I think that one's wishful thinking, whoever thinks it.
3) Last one: No one wants a writer without a platform. Strauss says this assumption is more true for nonfiction writers than fiction...and she's right. I'm still trying to build my platform; I wrote and sold my book without knowing what a platform was. In fact, I'm still not sure about the whole platform-building thing, since I'm such a newb to this aspect of the business. What I probably need is some help from my pug, Manley (named after the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins). Come on: How can you not follow a guy who has the devotion of a pug like this?

Manley likes laser pens and long walks in the dog park.

My write-up of Baltar vs. The Mountain That Rides is up on Suvudu on Monday! Don't forget to vote for Baltar! :)

Speaking to the APW

A couple months ago, the Rim Country Chapter of Arizona Press Women invited me to speak in Payson about writing genre fiction and how I got my start, and I accepted gladly. I've had plenty of practice keeping high school kids entertained for an hour, but could I do the same with adults? It turned out to be two hours. Once I got going I found out I had more to say than I thought. And they paid me a huge compliment—when the organizer asked about halfway (??) through if anyone wanted to stop and take a break, no one wanted to go! So that gave me warm fuzzies and I'm glad it wasn't a snorefest.

It was held at the East-West Book Exchange, an extremely cool little place with some gift shop goodies and a coffee bar (free wifi!) in addition to books and a lovely room that they rent out for yoga classes and small events like mine. Owners Chip and Lisa Semrau are gracious people and their mochas are fantastically good. Like holy-crap-I-think-Starbucks-sucks-now kind of good.

There were 35 people there, which I thought was fairly decent considering that I haven't even been published yet. Many of the people I spoke to had already been published in nonfiction markets but were curious about how to break into fiction, so I explained why getting an agent is a Really Good Idea and how one might best accomplish that, and I also spoke about urban fantasy tropes and the glorious fun of steampunk.

I saw some folks in the audience taking notes and they had some great questions afterward, so I hope it turned out to be helpful. I like to think of the market as a giant pie, and everyone should have a slice.

Mmm...pie.

Nom nom nom!

When you present the Cookie Monster with a cookie, he’s going to love it because he’s the frickin’ Cookie Monster. He’ll eat it and say, “Nom nom nom!” even if it’s kind of bland and stale. But if you present the Cookie Monster with a kind of cookie he’s never had before —a rich, moist, warm one, say, plus a glass of milk—the Cookie Monster will probably have a sugargasm and he’ll say, “Nomnomnomnomnom!” There will be crumbs and blue fur everywhere, and slightly alarmed innocent bystanders will cover their children’s eyes in the name of decency.

Urban Fantasy readers (like me, anyway) are kinda like the Cookie Monster when it comes to novels in the genre. Give me a UF novel and I’ll devour it happily, saying “Nom nom nom!” all the while. But I think I’m about ready for that book that sends me into unchained fits of turbo-nomming. I need a more varied diet in my UF reading, but I need other writers to help me out a bit here—and maybe some suggestions from readers who can point me in the direction of something I haven’t seen yet.

What I’d like to read are more stories told from the point of view of characters who aren’t your everyday UF hero(in)es. Instead of a shifter, vamp, faery, demon, or a half-version of any of the above, can we get a story told from the point of view of a wight who’s a mite misunderstood? How about a dude who escapes from a mad gene-splicing scientist with the head of a cuttlefish? I want to get inside the head of a half-mad half-squid, you see, and hear about his struggle to hold on to his humanity while he pursues vengeance against the butcher who replaced his whiskers with tentacles, and weep with him as he tries to reconnect with his wife and daughter, both of whom happen to be allergic to seafood.

Gnomes, trolls, goblins, kobolds—I don’t think anybody’s written the definitive work (correct me if I’m wrong!). I’ve seen some mermaid stuff in YA fiction—I’m thinking Emily Windsnap—and I might be missing a whole lot more because I don’t read much YA. There’s probably a centaur book or two out there, maybe a hipster hippogriff. But I definitely haven’t seen any attempts to write these sorts of characters in the adult UF market. Then again, I might be the only guy demanding such stuff, which would explain the short supply.

I don’t know how much demand there is out there to hear stories about Druids—I guess I’ll find out next year when my books hit the shelves!—but one reason I chose a Druid to be my main character was to attempt to introduce something new-ish to all the Cookie Monsters out there. I know that vampire/shifter/magic-girl love stories are popular—I completely understand because I like them too—but I can’t believe that’s all people want to read. I think there are vast opportunities in UF to tell some fresh tales, from the harrowing to the humorous, but somehow the genre has worn itself into a few distinct ruts already, and instead of treading new ground, people are throwing themselves into the same few grooves. If you think it’s too risky to try something a bit “out there,” well, I can always point to my publisher (Del Rey) and say look, there are editors in the biz willing to take a chance on an unorthodox hero, because they’ve taken a chance with Atticus O’Sullivan. (Harry Connolly’s hero, Ray Lilly, is not your average bear, and neither is Stacia Kane's Chess Putnam—and look! They're both with Del Rey! ;))

I hope to try some new cookies soon. If you’re a writer, I hope you’ll find time to experiment in the kitchen of your word processor. And if you know of any unusual UF narrators out there now, please let me know in the comments! Nom nom nom!

Playin' Taps for Sci-Fi

All right, before we get down to what I have to say, this blog post about the withering of sci-fi is a must-read. Go there, absorb like a sponge, maybe do a shot (or two) for courage, and then come on back. :)

I lament the slow, painful death of sci-fi, but I must acknowledge my role in its decline. I haven't bought but maybe two or three sci-fi books in years—even though I used to devour them when I was younger and didn't get into fantasy until later.

I think the sentiments expressed in that blog post by both Mr. Allen and Mr. Martin are correct—we've become less optimistic about the future, we might be thinking things are getting worse instead of better, and so the already large suspension of disbelief we'd need for lots of sci-fi grows exponentially with our worries. It's like, "DUDE, not only can you not travel faster than light, but you can't seriously think there'd be a worldwide human government in the future when all we've been doing for the last few decades is splintering into ever-smaller tribal factions even as we're joining the ‘global village.’"

But I think there's even more to it than that: I can't keep up with the science anymore, and perhaps (??) that's a large part of the decline as well. We know so much more about the costs and realities of space travel than we did in the 50's and 60's, and so it's tougher on those grounds to suspend our disbelief for spacefaring shenanigans. If I'm reading about this nanotech idea or that idea for an FTL drive, part of me will think it's cool and part of me will think, "this idea will be completely exploded in ten years."

The last sci-fi I was really into was cyberpunk. The dystopian futures laid out so clearly in William Gibson's novels and Stephenson's Snow Crash now seem quite spookily prescient: we have multinational corporations running things and an urban planet on the way where everyone is plugged into the net. Hmm. Maybe that's why I stopped; the fiction is becoming reality, and I read fiction to get away from reality.

I think the reason fantasy has become ascendant—besides fulfilling the need for escape—is that it's filling another need: the need to examine social structures from a safe distance and figure out where we went wrong. Sci-fi often looks at alternate social structures that we can't possibly hope to achieve anytime soon; these days the social issues raised in fantasy allow us to wonder if there's some way to make things better now, to hell with the future on other planets. The struggles that urban fantasy heroes face, in particular, permit us to say "Okay, I know modern life can be shit, but look at what THAT guy/girl has to deal with on top of everything else," and we feel a bit better. It's nice to think that someone can deal with everything we deal with plus paranormal issues.

The sci-fi I'd like to read now is that which convincingly envisions a way through these times. I'd buy a book like that and read it over and over and buy copies for all my friends. I'd like to be optimistic again; I'd like to see a rebirth of sci-fi because it would mean that optimism is widely shared. Until then, I'll read and write fantasy.

Punk Writing

I'm starting to like punks a whole lot. But not this kind:

I'm talking about steampunks. Dieselpunks. Atompunks. Fiction that's set in an alternate-history, alternate-tech sort of world, populated by characters who don't shop at IKEA and The Gap. Lots of brass gadgets and clockwork. Dirigibles. Language from a time when people used to read outside of school.

And the aesthetic is just plain cool. Look at this steampunk computer somebody made:

That's a working computer, folks. If you want to see the details and more pictures, click here. A lot of steampunk fans are also Makers. Have you heard of them?

Maker culture is thriving: here's a link to Make magazine. Broadly speaking, they're people who reject pop consumerism and make something new out of found items. There's a strong DIY ethic and a premium placed on personal creativity. And in terms of design, they usually don't want to hide the way something works, like modern doodads; they'd rather see all the gears and gizmos and the wires and so on. Here's a link to a video of this year's Maker Faire to get a sense of what they like.

In terms of writing, the opportunities are vast. The market isn't glutted yet, demand is increasing, and there's so much that can be done. In terms of writing trends, I think there's still plenty of room to get in on the ground floor here. Granted, if you're trying to come up with a Sherlock Holmes clone, that might be a tough sell, but look at what else is out there and doing well. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest features a kid and his mom in 19th-century Seattle. Leviathan and the forthcoming Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld feature a couple of young'uns, too, and that's WWI-era stuff, qualifying it as dieselpunk (though there are significant biopunk aspects as well). The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, is a biopunk novel doing quite well now. And then there's Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series, set in 19th-century London, which is definitely steampunk with a bit of urban fantasy and Jane Austen mashed in. (By the way, my next author interview is with Gail, and I'm very excited!)

I'm hoping inspiration will strike me soon for a punkish short story...or even a novel, heck, why not? I've started an epic fantasy and I've outlined the fourth book in my urban fantasy series, but it's never too late to start something else. Plenty of burners on the stove, right? Multitasking keeps the brain fresh and all that. Food for thought, anyway. :)

Help is Out There

...if you're writing a query. There's two kinds of help readily available on the Internet(s): what to do and what not to do. A couple of "what not to do" links:

First, an amusing collection of query fails from an agent in Slush Pile Hell. Go back and read some of the archives, too, they're seriously funny. But also kinda sad...they're all real.

Second, here's some recent advice from agent Jessica Faust about queries: Query Don'ts. Gotta thank @GailCarriger for directing me to it via Twitter.

Sticking with Ms. Faust, here's her deconstruction of a successful query letter for a mystery novel.

Then, I highly recommend joining the Absolute Write Water Cooler. Lots of published and soon-to-be-published writers there, and it's a very helpful community. They have a Share Your Work forum which is behind a password wall, so that the work doesn't show up on search engines. Inside, there's a lovely room called Query Letter Hell where you can post your query letter and get feedback. It can be brutal but it's helpful—you'll get a response and personal attention that agents and editors never have the time to give. There are many success stories in there, too—writers who got partial and full requests from agents and representation as well. Hope it helps.

Market Analysis: An Anecdote

Sometimes I wonder where writing fads come from...and then I look at the bestseller lists and go, oh yeah. All the people writing vampire books are looking at the Twilight series and the success of the Sookie Stackhouse novels and saying, I want a piece of that. And it's tough to blame 'em for wanting a slice of bestselling pie. (If I'm fortunate enough to be served up a plate, I won't say no; I'll ask for whipped cream.)

But here's the problem with writing according to fads or the market: what's popular now won't necessarily be popular a year or two from now, which is what you have to be thinking about if you're trying to anticipate the market. It takes a year for a publisher to get a fiction book onto the shelves—ten months if they rush it, nine if nobody sleeps. And before that, you have to actually write the book and get an agent, and said agent has to get you your deal. (Unless you're going to go the slush pile route, in which case you can add on another year to eternity.) So let's keep the math simple and say for the sake of argument, if you're trying to anticipate things, that you need to predict what editors will want to buy a year from now if you're writing your book. They, in turn, are gambling that your book will be popular the year afterward. If you write something derivative of today's market, thinking it's hot, by the time somebody has to make a decision, they'll be looking at your book like the hundredth peanut butter and jelly sandwich they've had in as many days. They're not going to be excited.

And so you must look at what's out there in the genre you wish to write—market awareness is good—and then write something new enough to stand out. Then, more importantly, decide if what you're writing is something you'd actually want to read. If you read a lot (an excellent idea), then you will pick up on the tropes of a certain genre and maybe, after a while, figure out what's missing. And if you want to read what's missing and write what's missing, then you might have landed on top of a Great Idea.

I don't think I'm a brilliant market analyst, but back in 2008 I noticed something missing from the urban fantasy market: dudes. Not only dudes as protagonists, but dudes as writers. There weren't many of either. The market was dominated by women writing about women, and the men in such tales were primarily romantic interests (all of which is fine, but as a reader dude I wanted more broken bones and fewer broken hearts). So I thought, hey, maybe there's an opportunity here. Would I like writing urban fantasy? I'd never tried it. But there was this webcomic idea I was working on, tremendously fun for me to imagine and write but extremely difficult to illustrate, that perhaps could be adapted...so I started toying with it. And once I found a groove, the writing went extremely fast—and that was before I added Mountain Dew.

"I'm a dude! I'm writing about a dude! This is great! Mwah-ha-ha-ha!" It was kind of like that, except twice as nerdy as you're imagining. But it wasn't simply reveling in my dudehood: I was also steering away from vampires, werewolves, demons, half-faeries and half anything for my main character. The shelves were already full of those. They're good stories—I devour them!—but the authors writing them were well established and I didn't have anything new to say there. My webcomic, though, was about a Druid. A quick check of the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble revealed that there were zero urban fantasies featuring a Druid in the title role. Heck, I couldn't find a Druid in a supporting role. Morgan Llewelyn wrote a book called Druids in 1993, but that was about historical Druids, not urban ones. So there you go—I figured out the market was missing urban Druid dudes, and I really, really wanted to write about one.

There's always a risk in doing something new, because if a story is too weird, agents and editors won't know how to market it. But the risk in following a fad is that when your manuscript arrives on an agent's or editor's desk, it will be the twentieth gnarly vampire romance they've seen that day. Would you rather they say, "WTF?" or "Not another one"? I'll take the WTF every time. (Which may come back to haunt me: I can see the reviews now.) But I got lucky: I found an agent who liked my Druid, and then my agent found a good number of editors who liked him, too—enough that I got the insane luxury of choosing my (extremely awesome) publisher, Del Rey.

Part of what's exciting about urban fantasy is that there's SO MUCH room for new ideas and twists—so the preponderance of the same few creatures appearing over and over is puzzling. I'm waiting for the story about the short supermarket clerk—often mistaken for a dwarf—who doesn't realize he's half gnome, and the emerald ring from his unknown father gives him complete control over cats if he wears it on his index finger...or something. Gnomes are always background critters, but they're begging to be fleshed out as a species. Somebody needs to write a gnome character I can care about. And what if trolls are only stupid and violent because of their militant political leadership and a poor education system? A visionary troll—self-taught through the Internet(s)—could arise and transform her culture if only she can survive the malignant attentions of the entrenched Club and Loincloth merchants who would keep them all lurking under bridges forever. Heh! You get the idea. My unsolicited advice is to always write what you like—but try to like something fresh in hopes that the market will be ready for it.

Some days are better than others

You probably noticed before now.

But when one has a really good day, the question must be asked, why was it so good? Can we isolate the goodness? Did it involve small furry animals at their cutest? Pizza at its tastiest? America's home videos at their funniest?

For me, really good days are those of staggering accomplishments, and today I accomplished a stagger, amongst other things.

Fueled partially by beer and partially by this incredibly hypercaffeinated song called "Valley of the Damned" that I had playing on loop, I wrote 4,000 words today. Usually I manage a mere thousand or a little bit more. It probably helped that I was writing a battle sequence between my Druid and twelve Valkyries. I mean, you're not going to listen to DragonForce with the speakers turned up to 11 when you're trying to write a poignant mother-daughter scene in a melancholy train station. Or maybe that's exactly what you'd do, because you're just that edgy...I don't know. ;-)

But when you want to have a really good day writing about people swinging swords at enemy appendages, you owe it to yourself to start out watching this video, which is what happens when the Platonic Ideals of Luxurious Hair and Manual Dexterity meet. Seriously, endure the commercial at the beginning, watch the whole thing and you'll be amazed. By the time you get finished watching the part where they have isolation cams on the guitar players' hands, you'll want to go get some high quality shampoo and conditioner, scrub it into your scalp really really fast, and then write about people killing each other. Heh!

74K now on Hammered. Next up, the climactic battle in Asgard! I just need to find the right song....oh, wait! Here it is! If that can't inspire me to write up some total carnage, I'm doomed. (Though I think parts of this video are unintentionally funny...)

Word Counts

Whenever you're tackling a big project like a novel, small goals are important, and the word count is an easy way to measure achievement. I'm at 60K words on Hammered today, so that's technically three-quarters of the way to my word count goal. It'll probably wind up going over 80K—Hounded and Hexed are both in the mid 80s—but heck, you take your milestones where you can. And I'm not saying these 60K words are golden. They'll get edited and revised and some passages will get cut out completely and replaced with something else. In the meantime, reaching a word count goal is an excuse to do a happy dance, because you need them while you're writing. It's far too easy to get discouraged otherwise.

Here's the difference between writing during school and writing during the summer: During school I averaged only 2550 words a week. During this first week of summer, I've written 9,000. It's really encouraging to make so much progress. I'm hoping I can keep up the pace to finish by the end of June...my deadline's at the end of July, and I like to be early if I can.

In other news, my brilliant wife, Kimberly, is also going to be published. Her article on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American dream was accepted by The Explicator, an academic journal, and will appear in their next issue. She's amused that students can now cite her in their papers about The Great Gatsby.

And for fans of Norse mythology (I know you're out there, Amalia), check out Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout if you haven't already. His protagonist is a valkyrie and he knows his stuff really well. He switches POV between the valkyrie, one of Odin's sons, Hugin and Munin, and others. I'm not finished with the book yet, but I've been entertained so far.

Alphas & Betas & Editing

This is about alpha and beta readers, not werewolves. Rarr! Sorry. It's also about all the fixin' that needs to be done before a book appears on the shelves.

Nobody writes perfect, golden prose on their first draft. Or even their second or third. I could be wrong...but I doubt it.

Every writer's different on how they approach these things, but it's fairly common to have some sort of feedback during the writing process. An objective pair of eyes can catch inconsistencies and let you know whether what you've written A) makes any sense and B) if you're entertaining. I use two alpha readers who look at each chapter as it's finished and one beta reader who looks at the whole novel only. These three people all look at the book before my agent or editor sees it.

So hey, shout-outs to my alphas, Alan and Tawnya: They catch all sorts of good stuff and let me know when I've made a factual error. For example: "Kevin, blue spruce trees don't grow in Europe. Dumbass."

Calling me a dumbass wasn't really part of the original comment—I simply felt like one. And I'm grateful to my alpha reader for checking on these things. I should have taken the time to research that, but I was probably in a character/plot groove and didn't want to pause to make sure I named the right species of tree. A good alpha reader will call you on stuff like that, and it's hard to find good alphas. Who'd want to read a novel in spastic spoonfuls, sometimes weeks apart, and nitpick instead of simply enjoying the story? Such people are a rare breed.

My beta reader, Andrea, is my Politically Correct filter. (Sometimes I put things in there just to set her off. It's funny when she gets into a snit.) She also finds inconsistencies in tone that occasionally creep in during the course of writing, and she suggests that I flesh out a character here or maybe leave out something there. Since she reads the whole book in a sitting or two, she spots larger issues rather than tiny ones.

After the alphas and beta are finished and I've made changes according to their suggestions, I send it off to my agent, who may/may not have plenty to say (there was a lot for Hounded, but he had me deliver Hexed to Del Rey as is) and only then do I deliver it to my editor. This means my editor is probably seeing my fourth or fifth draft, but I go ahead and call it my "first" draft in terms of my computer files.

Then we go back and forth with changes until she says heck, this is pretty good, I'll accept this. At that point everybody takes a few minutes for a happy dance. To give you an idea of quantity, there were five rounds of changes for Hounded, only three for Hexed.

But wait! We're not finished! Next the copy editor gets hold of it and lays down some Grammar Fu with a green pencil. He/she will also catch lots of factual issues, ask great questions, point out inconsistencies, and I can make changes there as necessary.

After that it goes to typesetting, and the only changes I can make then are minor spelling/punctuation doodads. Inserting/deleting passages is probably not a good idea at this point, because it costs money.

Finally, it's finished. Only after months of work will it go out to the general public. The author's name is on the cover so he/she gets all the credit, but quite a few people are involved with any publication. (I didn't even mention the cover artist and all the people in marketing and publicity. That'll be a blog for another day.) So to my alphas and beta and my agent & editor(s), thank you, and cheers.

Narrative Voices

Since my books are first-person narratives, it's easy to get into a bit of a rut. Ruts can be nice, mind you. Sometimes they're downright comfy. But sometimes you'd like to put on a new pair of shoes and step out of that rut. Stretch your legs, go on a minor perambulation off-road, discover wombats lurking in the undergrowth. Find buried treasure. Or simply find out where the hell this metaphor is going, because I'm not sure anymore.

I've been stepping outside the (entirely pleasant) rut lately. For five chapters in Hammered, I get to tell the story in the voice of a different narrator. Making each narrator sound (and read) differently than my accustomed narrative voice is the fun bit. And it's really bizarre what it can do to your head when you sink yourself so deeply into a character that you begin to think like him.

One of my characters is especially hirsute—as in, don't let him make you any food without a full-body hairnet. After writing in his voice for an hour, I was overwhelmed with an urgent need to shave. And get a haircut. I actually felt hairier after writing and thinking in his voice.

That might indicate I have a dire need for therapy. But I hope it means I'm writing a lively character with his own personality.

Hmmm. If writing a hairy character makes me want to shave...I think I'll create a skinny character next and drop ten pounds after writing a thousand words in his voice. And I will never, ever write a criminal because I like living outside of jail.

I know not how others do it, but I create a very specific set of verbal tics for each character. Leif Helgarson doesn't use contractions often, for example, giving his diction an almost ridiculous level of formality. A Russian character neglects to use articles and often forgets to use pronouns, etc.

51K on Hammered now. For some reason, being over 50K makes me feel like I'm sprinting for the finish line. I do a little "Halfway!" dance all through the 40s, but once I hit 50K I know I'm on the home stretch. D'oh! Writing "home stretch" made Mötley Crüe's "Home Sweet Home" pop into my head. And now that I've written it down and you've read it, it's in your head too. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Mötley Crüe is a virus.

Three Writing Myths Busted

I like encouraging folks to write. It gives me warm fuzzies. I think most everyone has a story to tell, and if they want to work at it hard enough and long enough to tell it very, very well, then they should be able to find an audience for that story and someone willing to pay them for it.

But it can be discouraging, I know, to work for so long on a project with no certainty of it ever sitting on a bookshelf with its own cute little ISBN barcode.

Luckily, there's some encouragement to be had. Fantasy author Jim Hines recently conducted a survey of 246 published sci-fi/fantasy authors about how they sold their first books, and the full results of that survey are now posted on his blog. Here's the link to his awesome work, please check it out.

Though it's obviously skewed toward sci-fi/fantasy authors, it contains information that should be useful to everyone, and busts a few pervasive myths. I'll highlight a couple of them here and throw in my personal, anecdotal info.

Busted Myth #1: You have to sell short fiction first. 
Out of 246 authors, 116 sold a book without ever selling a short story. That includes me. (I participated in Jim's survey.)

Busted Myth #2: Traditional publishing is dead, self-publishing is the way to go.
Not so much. There are huge, isolated success stories—Christopher Paolini is the one that comes to mind—but the key word here is isolated. Those kinds of success stories are anomalies. Out of the 246 surveyed authors, only one self-published first before getting picked up by a major publisher.

Busted Myth #3: You have to know someone in the business to get published.
140 of the authors (over half) had no contacts at either their agency or their publisher before making their first book sale. I'm one of those. I know four whole people in the industry now, but I still haven't met them in person: I know my agent and a colleague of his, and I know my editor and assistant editor at Del Rey. But I "met" my agent through a query letter. And I didn't "speak" to my editor until my agent made the deal. So the proof is there and it's solid: you can get into this business based solely on the power of your written words.

There are many more nuggets of golden info to be found in the survey—I highly recommend it—but here are the last couple of stats I'd like to point out: It seems most of the authors sold their first books in their mid to late 30's. (I was 38 at the time of the sale.) And while 58 authors sold the first book they ever wrote, many wrote 2-4 books before they got their first sale. I wrote two other books before I wrote Hounded and learned so much in the process. I also learned quite a bit from the process of writing Hounded; I wrote the next book in the series more quickly and it didn't require as much editing.

Hopefully this info will encourage some of you on your journey to getting published!

Enormity of a novel vs. wee little goals

If someone says unto thee, "I must have your completed novel in five months. Begin," what you would begin is not a novel at all, but an epic freakout over the impossibility of the demand. The number of words involved—75,000-120,000, depending on your book—boggles the mind and shuts down the engine of the little train who could.

So don't think about that. All that will get you is a plate of roasted fail drizzled in a savory fail sauce and served with a side of fail.

Instead, think about all those people in November who write novels in a month. And think about writing the equivalent of a three to five-page paper each day until you're finished, the kind your English teacher made you write. About a thousand words per day. You can do that. It'll take you a couple of hours, maybe three. Plus you can hold down a day job. You might not get to watch TV, but what you're writing is better than anything on TV anyway, right? Maybe on a weekend you could write more than a thousand. If you were super diligent about that, you'd have a 90,000-word novel in three months.

But you're not going to be super diligent, because you have a life. Or if you don't, I'm sure you're trying to get one. That's okay, I highly recommend having a life. You can take off a day or two here and there and still make your deadline in five months. And you know what? The year's not even half over! You can write another novel before the year is out! You can even take two months off for a backpacking trip across Europe and then come home and write a novel about it!

The first novel of my series, Hounded, took me over a year because I didn't have a deadline and I was attempting to have a life. I left it alone for weeks, even months at a time because there wasn't any urgency. After I got a contract, I wrote much more quickly. :) I wrote the second book in five months. Now I'm already a third of the way through writing the third book and I have until July to finish it. The practice helps, and the deadline helps a lot.

So give yourself a deadline and start practicing. If you'd like to see how long many Sci-fi/Fantasy authors worked at getting published before selling their first book, check out this handy-dandy info here courtesy of fantasy author Jim Hines, who surveyed 246 SF/F authors and crunched the numbers. You'll see that some of them worked a long, long time. Decades. Some of them, on the other hand, sold books after a just a few years. None of them ever gave up. My data is in that survey; I wrote for 19 years before I sold my first book. If you're an aspiring writer, I hope you'll be one of those who sells theirs quickly—but if the time of "quickness" has already passed for you, I hope you'll keep working anyway—the practice helps.

Serendipitous surprises

I love it when something cool happens in the writing process that I didn't plan ahead of time. Just like a reader enjoys being surprised (most of the time) by what happens in a book, I like to be surprised while I'm writing it. It's a large part of what makes writing enjoyable. The characters take on a life of their own and do things I never expected, and sometimes these surprises turn out to be major plot points.


When I'm planning a book I write chapter by chapter outline that contains the major events of each chapter, nothing more. It's a guideline with lots of room for detours. Sometimes the detours are lengthy.


For example, in Hexed I had a priest and a rabbi walk into a pagan bookstore as a joke and it turned out to become a major subplot of both that book and Hammered. 


Right now, as I'm writing Hammered, a trip to Asgard that I thought was going to take one chapter has now taken four. And because of the way things have developed, there is going to be a vampire problem that I never outlined at all, but I can't wait to write it. Jesus was to make a cameo appearance in chapter four, but now he's going to be pushed back to chapter nine or ten because of other events that have developed in the meantime.


After the book is finished I like to compare the outline to the finished product. All the events of Hexed I had outlined are in there, but they're in a different sequence than I originally planned and there are several bonus events that crept in, like the priest and rabbi subplot.


25K on Hammered now. And if anyone knows a reliable Hebrew speaker, give me a shout; I need to translate a couple of sentences for the book.

Fascinating info on the biz

Fantasy author Jim Hines conducted a survey of 247 sci-fi and fantasy authors—myself included—on how they broke into the business. The information should be interesting (even encouraging) to anyone trying to make their first professional sale. Here's the link. This is only part one of several blogs where he'll break down the data, so stay tuned for more updates.

Many thanks to Jim for putting this together. The numbers show that the self-publishing route is pretty grim; but it also shows that a surprising number of people have broken into the industry without an agent and without a single short story sale.

Short stories take a long time

I can write a thousand words a day on my novel, but for some reason a short story won't let me write more than 400 words per diem.

I've rewritten the first page about three times now.

I've changed the title five times and I told the last one not to get too comfortable at the top of the page, because he's going to get revised like all the others.

I've written long descriptions of Flagstaff and then deleted it all because it didn't advance the plot.

I may need to write a thousand words in HEXED and then tell the short story, "See? This is how you're supposed to behave. Why can't you be like a novel?"

Yeah. That'll show it.