My Right to Write Right

It’s always been said, and I believe it, that you should write what you want to read. I don’t see how you can argue with this. Sure, you can say that this isn’t the most commercial approach, but if you’re in this business to make money, then you’re in the wrong business. The chances of immediate and significant commercial success in writing are greater than of winning the lottery, but the lottery is a lot less work.

The problem with the commercial approach (assuming you can make it work) is that you’re going to spend your life writing what makes you money and not what makes you happy. This is not a “woke” aphorism; this is whether you want writing to be like any other 9-to-5 job or if you want to spend your days being your own boss and daydreaming for a living. I mean, you’re going to write either way.

Most of us who write do it because we simply can’t help ourselves. Writing is our compulsion. If I skip it long enough, I get withdrawal symptoms. I start getting antsy and nervous and feeling as if life is slipping away from my control–the same symptoms I get when my submissions have been out too long. I guess you can’t win.

If you’re going to write anyway, you might as well write something you enjoy. Stories come out of your head. If you aren’t enjoying what’s coming out of your head, then you either need to be a horror writer or in therapy. Probably both.

So I write what I would want to read. Which is good, because I’m going to have to read it at least two or three times before I start subbing it, and again if I sell it and have to review the galleys. If I don’t like what I’m doing, I’m going to be bored out of my skull.

Write what you’d like to read if someone else wrote it. You may sell it; you may not. But if you keep doing that, if you keep on putting down the stories you love, then you will sell them. Because some editor out there loves those stories too. And he knows how to reach others who love them. It may be a small circle, but you will have contributed to their love and they will appreciate you. Heck, they’ll even pay you.

Someday, maybe, if you’re the luckiest snowball in hell, they’ll pay you a lot.

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Oops, I Did It Again

Yes, I did. After proclaiming loudly that four Kindle Vella serials simultaneously was enough for any one writer, I came up with a new one… That makes five… I am so ashamed.*

Well. No point in hiding under my blankets. The new serial is called “City of the Maze,” and it will be a continuation of my book series, The Stolen Future. It won’t require reading the preceding books; it’s designed to be read and enjoyed on its own. (Of course, I hope you will read the other books; they’re fun.)

Time-traveling hero Keryl Clee is off on another adventure, shanghaied not in time, but in space, as in the middle of a sensitive mission, he is forced to bring his flyer down in an unknown land, on the side of the world that no one he knows has ever seen or heard from. The side that, more than likely, shoots trespassers on sight.

Who has done this to him? What is their purpose? Can Keryl escape to return to his wife and home? There is only one way, and it leads through the City of Mazes, a metropolis so strange, mysterious, and unknowable that even its own inhabitants cannot find their way around. The secrets that this city holds may plunge the entire world into war.

Meanwhile, an alien fleet is orbiting Earth. No one can guess why they are there, or why after a journey of tens of light years they will not speak, or acknowledge our existence. Do they intend to land? And when they do, will life on this planet ever be the same?

*Three of said serials are under my name; the other two were written under the pen name “Ken Lowell.”

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Writing is Like Your Body

Writing is like your body because:

You think the longer you live with it, the easier it will be to understand.

A thousand and one things can go wrong with it and no two people will ever agree why.

You can work and sweat and sculpt and rework but it will never reach the perfection you crave.

If you’re skillful enough, people will pay for the privilege of sharing it.

If you don’t show it off, people will tell you to flaunt it; if you flaunt it, people will criticize you for seeking attention.

No matter what’s inside, people will judge you by your cover.

Pain is a teacher.

The brain and the heart are both important.

And the number one reason why writing is like your body…

The best way to improve it is to exercise it regularly.

#SFWApro

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It’s Not Your Fault

Recently, I saw in my Facebook feed one of those memes that people insist on putting up that they assert describes the world, this one contending that if you are not where you want to be in life, it’s solely and completely your own fault for making bad choices. Although I usually ignore such things on the basis that it’s not worth fighting over someone else’s unsubstantiated opinion, this time I had to make a comment to the effect that “only people who’ve actually managed to succeed ever make pronouncements about how everyone else’s failure is his own fault.” Your typical working stiff would never say something so dismissive. Why was I so moved, you ask? Because I’m a writer, and writers have a nearly unique point of view on this question.

The truth is, the “you made your choices” argument is garbage. You are not defined solely by your choices; there are 7 billion other human beings on this planet and their choices affect you every minute, not to mention the sheer randomness of nature and the entropy of the universe. People can and do work all of their lives, make the best choices they are capable of making, and still get nowhere. It’s sad, but it’s true. Read a modern novel some time.

“A novel?” you ask. Yes, because as I said, writers have a POV that most people don’t, for two reasons:

First, writers spend most of their lives absolutely at the mercy of others. From the time we submit our manuscripts to the day our books are declared out of print (or we are), we don’t control our own fates. Editors accept or reject, and on their own schedule. Publishers pick marketing plans, covers, blurbs, prices… The public decides to buy or not to buy. Will your book become a movie? Don’t ask me, it isn’t my call to make. We don’t even choose to write; we have to. The only thing we control is whether to submit our work for publication.

Second, because we write, we understand power. No one will argue that power doesn’t run the world, and in a writer’s world, he is the only power. Characters are born, live, and die by our whim. (I still recall the first time I decided to resurrect a character in a subsequent draft.) Every book is a universe and we are its creator, imbued with absolute authority. If you think that doesn’t give you an understanding of power, try it sometime and see.

And yet, even we are subject to higher powers; in the end, it is the public (assuming the story gets that far) that decides if we have made the right choices. (Ironically, there is never a consensus.) The characters can’t make choices; if they did, I assume they would choose to be published, to be read. So if I, who have absolute control over my characters’ thoughts, emotions, actions, and lives, cannot control their destiny, how do I control my own?

This is not to say I’m a fan of nihilism and nothing you do makes any difference. That’s known as “giving up.” We’ve all been at that point, but usually we find a way to continue. And things, in the general sense, do get better. What I’m trying to say is that dismissing everyone else’s struggles as their own shortcoming is just a way of saying, “Nyahh, nyahh, I made it and you didn’t and I’m better than you.”

And you know what, if that’s your idea of success, then you’ve missed the whole point. And I don’t care how good your book is, I don’t want to read it.

#SFWApro

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World Fantasy Con and Me

Happy to announce that I will be a speaker at the World Fantasy Convention in Los Angeles, October 31 – November 3, 2019. My panel is called “Switching Gears,” which sounds more like steampunk, but here’s the description.

Switching Gears: Some writers work solely in one genre. Others write create in several genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, crime, etc. Which writers do, why do they do it, and how do they do it? What does it take to able switch gears between fantasy or horror and, for example, mystery? And for the writers who do “switch gears”, how do their various genre works compare to each other.

For the record, I have published science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction (as well as non-fiction). My fantasy (which seems most relevant) ranges from noir (the theme of the convention) to Gothic to humorous adventure. Come to think of it, a lot of my SF is humorous as well. Whether the panel will consider “humor” to be a separate genre worthy of discussion remains to be seen.

Spoiler alert: I don’t think writing in multiple genres is a big deal–you read in multiple genres, right? I guess it’s going to be a short panel…unless I manage to stick my foot in my mouth again–although I still maintain that the Star Trek panel riot wasn’t my fault.

So if you’re coming to the con, stop by and see me. But please leave the tomatoes outside.

#SFWApro

 

 

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You Can’t Cite It if You Didn’t Write It

If you’re old enough, you might remember years ago a brokerage ad that claimed the company made money “the old-fashioned way–they earn it.” Now, as I was working in that industry, I had my own opinions, but regardless, the ad was built upon the idea that success, to be valued, must be earned. Alas, as events are demonstrating, success is not always earned. It can be purchased.

The news is full today of reports of the college admissions scandal where wealthy parents bribed administrators and coaches to get their kids into top-name institutions. (Disclosure: One of those institutions is my alma mater.) Aside from the sheer illegality of the arrangement, and the question of whether it did those kids any good to dump them into a curriculum and competition for which they were unprepared, they were certainly not earning their way in. And in this light, that scandal bears parallels to writing and publishing.

You see, people have made a lot of money on Amazon by gaming the system. For example, one system depends on how many pages of your book someone reads. It’s possible to set up a volume where the reader goes directly to the last page, but the system sees this as someone reading the entire book, giving the “author” full royalty credit. The end result is that he gets something for nothing. (Supposedly these schemes are being addressed.) That’s a scam.

There are other scams, such as ghost writing. A lot of celebrity autobiographies are actually ghost-written for a fee by a writer whose name doesn’t appear on the cover, but really, who thinks that actor really wrote his own book? This isn’t what I’m talking about, because the actor doesn’t derive his fame from his “autobiography,” and doesn’t expect to. And a lot of big-name writers engage in “collaborations” with mid-level authors, where the former’s contribution varies widely, and may be limited to a mere concept or outline. Again, at least the real author’s name is on the cover.

The problem lies when an author hires someone to write a book and slaps his or her own name on the cover with the intention of claiming the fame of writing the book for himself. The same goes for plagiarists. Like the saying goes, “If you do the crime, you do the time,” but in this case, “You can’t cite it if you didn’t write it.”

Somebody once asked Robert Heinlein why he wrote novels. He said: “For the money.” Now while this is a good answer (assuming you’re making any money), it probably wasn’t his only motivation. At least I’d like to think so. (And given how many easier ways there are to make money, particularly for a man of his abilities, I doubt it.) Writing is an act of creation, an art.

Any act of creation not only earns a reward, it is a reward, and that’s true if you’re writing Starman Jones or building a house. Surprising even myself, I like watching Project Runway, not because I care about fashion, but because I am fascinated with the act and process of producing something entirely new in so short a time. In a way it reinforces my own belief in my own work, because I am also producing something completely new (if not in 24 hours).

I have seen more than one of those designers go home because they lost a challenge, saying they don’t care what the judges thought, because they stand behind their work, even when they lost. And that’s the reward of creation. It’s like loving your children even when they disappoint you; you don’t do it because they might become famous and buy you a house, you do it because you created them.

If you are writing solely for money, I don’t want to know you. And if you are taking money for something you didn’t even create, I don’t even want to share the same universe with you.

Which I won’t. Because I’ve created my own.

#SFWApro

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It’s Good Advice, but… Part II

Last time, class, we considered the question of the classic advice, “Write what you want to read.” We concluded that it was good advice, so long as one is prepared to accept that one may be the only person in the world who wants to read it. (Or one of a relatively small handful.) This leads us to wonder, however, what other timeless bits of advice have only limited benefits? And how are they limited?

Let’s begin by acknowledging that no one writer’s career path is the same. (Honestly, if we acknowledge that, we can dispense with the rest of this post, but that would be kind of pointless. So let’s simply accept it as an underlying theme.) Just as no writer is going to reach success by the same route as any other, no one set of “rules” is going to apply to every writer. But as one who has been haunting the edges of this business since submissions were made on paper, through the mail, I’ve seen a great many truisms float by my eyes, and I’ve come up with some opinions:

Write what you know. This is good advice. Indispensable, actually. As classic as “Write what you like to read,” but more philosophically obtuse. The question always comes up: “What do I know about spaceships/dragons/zombies?” The answer is that this is not what the advisor is talking about. Fiction of every kind is about people. Write what you know about Life. Then dress it up with zombies.

All authors need a web presence. Well, yes and no. You should have some kind of web page, because readers like to know about their favorite authors, at least listing a basic biography and bibliography. But you don’t need a blog, unless you want one. In fact, if you’re not into the Internet at all, don’t create a page. A neglected web site is worse that none. Same goes for other on-line experiences.

Don’t pay to be published. This is absolutely true. You don’t pay a publisher, and you don’t pay an agent. Ever.

Don’t quit. If you persist long enough, you will be published. Again, yes and no. The only guarantee is that if you do quit, you won’t ever make it. But there’s no guarantee that persistence will always win–although it is an odds-on favorite.

You can break the rules when you’re successful. Well, yes, sometimes, but you may need to break the rules to be successful.* The question is not whether people will let you break the rules, but whether you can break them well enough that people allow it. You may do that first time out; you may never do it. If the story demands it, do it, and let the chips fall where they may.

Self-publishing is the only way to go. You keep all the control, and you reap much more money. This is highly questionable.  No one really knows how self-publishing works. There are a thousand ways to succeed, and a million ways to fail. People who say that self-publishing is the One True Path are as bad as those who swear it is the wide road to Hell. It may be for you, and it may not.

Writers should refrain from taking political stances on social media. Gauge your audience. Are your views such that they will disagree with you? Strenuously? Then you should probably keep your thoughts to yourself–at least by that name. On the other hand, if you think it will help, go for it. Activists like to write; why shouldn’t writers…activate? Just be prepared to take what comes.

Show, don’t tell. We finish with another classic, one of the few real “rules.” Pretend you are the reader, experiencing the story through your protagonist’s eyes. Instead of writing that, “He came upon a village,” tell us what he saw: “A collection of one-story huts, built of ill-fitted timbers plugged with dried mud that would have washed away in the first rain, were such a thing ever seen in this parched land.”

Writing is a lot like life: The only good rules are those which are so infuriatingly vague that you can spend decades trying to figure out what they mean. Try not to think of it as “vagueness” so much as “wiggle room.” Write a story you’d like to read, and make it entertaining. Just don’t get so caught up in following someone else’s rules that you don’t define your own. (Except no. 3. Always follow no. 3.)

*Please don’t ask me to define success. You have to define it for yourself.

#SFWApro

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Life is as Hard as We Write It

It isn’t easy being a writer. Or any kind of creative person. If it were, everyone would do it, and the world would be an even more beautiful place. But it isn’t, for reasons that most people could come up with if they were to bother: How do you get ideas? How do you stretch those ideas out to cover several thousand (or several hundred thousand) words? How do you find the time? The list goes on.

If you’re a writer, however, you’ve already come up with answers to these questions. (Well, all but the last three…) But even then, there’s the problem of persistence. Not the persistence it takes to submit and re-submit the same story to various markets maybe four dozen times with no reason it will succeed. (I think my record for rejections before a sale is 44.) That’s a long-term sort of persistence; I’m talking about the day-to-day, the persistence it takes to complete a single project, especially a novel.

2017 was a very hard time for writers (at least liberal writers). The year was a socio-political mess (no matter whose side you’re on), and outside events kept getting in the way. This doesn’t count all of the large and small personal crises and problems that nip at your available time (the kids are sick, your boss was mean today, a death in the family). Maintaining your focus in the face of these events is hard. They make you not want to write; they slow you down. What’s the point of creating a fantasy world when the real world is so screwed up?

And maybe that is the point. When we’re writing, when we’re creating, we have control. Our worlds are only as screwed up as we want them to be–and we can fix them (or not). I’m not saying that we should concentrate on our stories to the exclusion of the real world, but perhaps being able to exert some control in here will help us feel we can exert some control out there.

So we can’t feel guilty about focusing. At the same time, feeling guilty about not focusing just makes it worse. This is a hard life we’ve chosen, but then, Life is hard. And we get through it every day.

Just remember, your characters have it even worse than you do.

#SFWApro

 

 

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Editing the Experiment

I’m editing The Scent of Death, and it’s going… pretty well. As in, I’m not having to erase large tracts of pages and replace them. There are the usual awkward phrasings, the repetitious words, and some inconsistencies that I am correcting (all of them, I hope). But in the main, it’s going okay.

But it’s not going quickly. It feels as though editing is taking longer than the writing did. This is ridiculous, of course; last night I edited sixty pages. (If I could write sixty pages in one night, I’d be producing a novel a week.) But it feels that way.

The problem is that when you edit, you are rereading a novel you just, in effect, read. And when you write the whole damned thing in two months, you haven’t even had time to forget the beginning, let alone the ending. In my whole life, I have immediately gone back and read a novel a second time exactly once. And I wasn’t reading that one critically.

Which is the other problem, or really, the second half of the problem. You aren’t just reading the book, you’re editing it. You’re deliberately finding all the faults in your own work, and that’s everyone’s favorite pastime, right? How can a project which you tackled so joyfully a few weeks ago be such a pain in the neck now?

It’s kind of like being Victor Frankenstein, and after the first flush of creation, you see all the warts and flaws. You’d like to just start again and fix some of those things in the next version, but you’re still stuck with what you’ve just done. A book, like a seven-foot-tall golem, wants to go places. It wants to be seen by people. It doesn’t like being chained in a dungeon. So you have to let it out, but you can’t let it out like it looks now. People would be frightened. They’d call it a monster–and then they’d call you one, too. Worse yet, they’d call you a bad writer. Pitchforks and torches are one thing, but bad reviews…

So you edit your little monster, and you teach it some manners, and  you let it out, hoping that it won’t do too much damage and that eventually, when the next creation is ready, it will help them forget about your earlier, flawed, attempt. But then, if you’re lucky, to your surprise people start to befriend your monster, and to see in it the beauty you had always wanted to show, but thought you’d failed to do. And you realize that, after struggling through all that editing, maybe you didn’t create such a monster after all.

But by then, you’ve got another little creation coming out of the printer, and he’s all covered in warts and flaws, and his ears are where his nose should be, and you wonder if you’re ever going to get this right…

#SFWApro

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Blame It on Comic-Con

The storm of events that seems determined to sabotage The Experiment has continued–which is a non-self-accusatory way of saying that progress on the novel this week was almost non-existent. I am at 39,831 words, which is about 2,000 words ahead of last week (as opposed to the planned 6,000). The culprit this week, as you might have noticed, is Comic-Con.

We hadn’t been for several years, but when The Better Half managed to snag tickets (no mean feat), we decided we really had to go. So we went down to San Diego on Thursday morning. This meant, for the purposes of this post, that Thursday was a non-writing day; since I knew there would be no chance to do anything useful, I didn’t even bring the laptop. But it also meant that we had to pack on Wednesday, so that night was lost, too (as was Tuesday, for other pre-event reasons). Ergo, the book was pushed back essentially another week.

I don’t blame Comic-con for this; I was the one who agreed to go, after all. And I thought it might present a marketing opportunity for The Invisible City, currently available for free on Smashwords (hint, hint). Comic-con has rules about these things, however, so our efforts were constrained. (All credit to The Better Half, though, who is far better at getting people to take promotional postcards from strangers than I am. Of course, she’s better-looking, so that helps.)

Comic-con itself was pretty much what I expected, crowded and full of long lines. I was surprised to see how it’s spilled out beyond the confines of the Convention Center; there were some interesting things that you could get into even if you weren’t a member. I had my first taste of VR over the weekend, for example. It needs work, but it’s intriguing.

And it’s one of the few places you can wear a kilt and not be stared at. TBH is a rabid Outlander fan, and I volunteered to attend the panel she wanted to see, in a kilt. This meant wearing the kilt all day. They really are quite comfortable. I might incorporate it into my convention persona.

Okay, yes, there are pictures.

This week there’s no Comic-con, and no excuses! Full speed ahead! Six thousand words or bust! We have a book to write.

#SFWApro

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