Category Archives: Writing

Writing in the digital era

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Booksquare, blogging about how Google might play in the publishing industry, has some advice for writers, starting with those who have “midlist, backlist and deadlist” books out there:

[A]uthors who are not actively acquiring their rights should be hiring lawyers. Rights are power. We’ve said this before and we will say this again: get your damn rights back as soon as possible. There is no money in sitting on the out-of-print shelf. Next book? Time limits. Open-ended “in print”  clauses are dangerous and expensive. Negotiate specific time periods with specific deadlines and sell-offs. They want to keep your book? Let them pay more.

Pretty savvy advice, I’d say.

What he said

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Just when you thought one could hardly find a new virtue to ascribe to the blogosphere, we have this, in a piece at 2Blowhards about pulp fiction:

I was brainwashed, er, educated into reading and appreciating upscale fiction, yet my own temperament much prefers popular fiction. Games with words and concepts can amuse me for a while, but on a gut level I love narrative. In this, I’m like most people, of course. It’s funny the degree to which the upscale set has made so many readers feel apologetic about preferring story to intellectual shenanigans and art-games, isn’t it? Story is basic, after all; without it, there’s no such thing as fiction in the first place. Where highfalutin’ artists and audiences often see narrative as a to-be-regretted necessity, I see it as an inviting and giant playground. Where the upscale set often experiences the requirements of story as getting in the way of creativity and visions, I see narrative as what makes expression possible.

I can remember exactly when I realized that for me as a writer, it was about telling stories. I was an undergraduate, a Comparative Literature major, and reading all kinds of High Literature, but on the side I’d begun collecting volumes of folk tales at second hand bookstores, I’d become fascinated with literature’s oral roots, with the image of people gathered around a communal fire, trading stories, and how once in awhile someone would come along who was just that much better at telling them; someone who knew how to embellish an old tale just so, how to draw out the suspense, how to time the climax.

I was a hair’s breadth from becoming an academic, applying to graduate school and embarking on a writing career that would have hinged, always, on writing for other academics. But I broke.

I went for a long time afterward not writing much fiction — too much other stuff to sort out — but my fundamental commitment had been made. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to write books that people draw up to, transfixed, the way they once listened to storytellers spin tales around those ancient fires.

Do I have the chops? I don’t know. But that’s my aspiration.

I hang out on a chicklit forum on Yahoo (a fabulous resource for anyone who writes commercial women’s fiction) and once every couple of months someone will post a link to yet another review that sniffs at the chicklit genre for not being Literature, for not being High Art.

And every time, I feel like I’m looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope — something far away. And preternaturally tiny . . .

Update: posted more thoughts on literary versus popular/genre fiction here.

Funny scammer. Make me laugh.

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Via Dawno’s blog, the outrage Barbara Bauer triggered today has spread like wildfire around the blogosphere: Barbara Bauer hit number 5 in the top Technorati searches! lol

Click the link to see a screen shot :-)

Scroll down to today’s earlier posts to see what this is all about, if you haven’t heard yet.

Dawno has also posted about a threat Bauer made, in writing, to Angela Hoy, who runs another writer’s forum, Writer’s Weekly. A forum member posted a question about Bauer — there was nothing negative, just a question — and Bauer responded by emailing Hoy that if she didn’t remove the post, Bauer would sue her for one BILLION dollars. Dawno quips: “anyone else hearing Dr. Evil when they read that?”

LOL

Update: more Barbara Bauer hilarity ensues!

Taking action!

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Here’s a link to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFFW) “top 20 worst literary agents.” (UPDATE: link no longer good but list below.)

None of these agencies has a significant track record of sales to commercial (advance-paying) publishers, and most have virtually no documented and verified sales at all (book placements claimed by some of these agencies turn out to be “sales” to vanity publishers). All charge clients before a sale is made–whether directly, by levying fees such as reading or administrative fees, or indirectly, for editing or other adjunct services.

This is the stuff that got Absolute Write in trouble (see my previous post).

And here’s the list.

The Abacus Group Literary Agency
Allred and Allred Literary Agents (refers clients to “book doctor” Victor West of Pacific Literary Services)
Barbara Bauer Literary Agency
Benedict Associates (also d/b/a B.A. Literary Agency)
Sherwood Broome, Inc.
Capital Literary Agency (formerly American Literary Agents of Washington, Inc.)
Desert Rose Literary Agency
Arthur Fleming Associates
Finesse Literary Agency (Karen Carr)
Brock Gannon Literary Agency
Harris Literary Agency
The Literary Agency Group, which includes the following:
-Children’s Literary Agency
-Christian Literary Agency
-New York Literary Agency
-Poets Literary Agency
-The Screenplay Agency
-Stylus Literary Agency (formerly ST Literary Agency, formerly Sydra-Techniques)
-Writers Literary & Publishing Services Company (the editing arm of the above-mentioned agencies)
Martin-McLean Literary Associates
Mocknick Productions Literary Agency, Inc.
B.K. Nelson, Inc.
The Robins Agency (Cris Robins)
Michele Rooney Literary Agency (also d/b/a Creative Literary Agency, Simply Nonfiction, and Michele Glance Rooney Literary Agency)
Southeast Literary Agency
Mark Sullivan Associates
West Coast Literary Associates (also d/b/a California Literary Services)

If you blog about writing, you may want to post the link too. Jim Hines explains why.

Absolute Write taken offline

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Via Miss Snark: the Absolute Write website has been pulled.

Making Light has the story.

Absolute Write was an excellent resource for writers: it publicized the activities of scam agents.

It’s not clear precisely why the site was taken down. The hosting service was apparently threatened by Barbara Bauer, one of the agents whose carryings-on have been documented on the blog. However, the hosting service owner has also just revived her own rival site . . .

The good news is, according to the comments on the Making Light post, the AW owner is already making plans to have the site restored to a new host.

Update: Absolute Write is now here.

Draft one, done

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Completed the first draft of my current work-in-progress yesterday. Surprisingly emotional moment for me, which I hope means the book’s ending will have an emotional impact on readers.

It’s short, at 57K, but one of the items that I backburnered this round is the further development of a couple of the minor characters, so the revision process is going to bulk it up some.

All the same, it’s doubtful that it will hit the 80K range which seems to be the minimum target of most commercial fiction.

I plan to blog about the ever-perplexing “length” issue soon but not today. Trying to keep my attention on writing, still, not writing about writing ;-)

Worlds within worlds

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I’m fascinated by the question of whether there really is a line between one’s inner and outer experience. How much of what we “objectively” experience is “in reality” ha ha ha a projection of our inner lives?

I’m not going to prove out the answer to that question on this blog. Leastways not right now :-D However, when it comes to fictional worlds, the conclusion is foregone. By definition, the world a novelist creates is an inner world — interior to the writer as it’s created; interior to readers as it’s read.

Yet it must also depict what appears to be an “outer world” from the perspective of its characters.

And here’s where the fun begins, because from the perspective of the characters, that outer world must be an extension of their inner worlds. Perhaps, in real life, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. But in a novel, it must always, always be something more, because the novelist can’t spare a single word. Williams’ “no ideas but in things” is not a pretty platitude. We are slaves to it. We must wield every “thing” in our novels as the ideas that they are. If we don’t, the novel becomes cluttered with dead weight, and quickly renders itself irrelevant at best, unreadable at worst.

A SORT OF A SONG

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

William Carlos Williams

I’ve been writing professionally for years, and making quite a decent living at it, but the writing I’ve done for my day job has been article-length stuff. And then I did a non-fiction book and was amazed at how it stretched my mental muscles, to manage something so long. But even non-fiction can be broken down into chunks — that’s what an outline is, after all, the book’s subject matter divided into pieces, and each piece treated as a discrete piece of writing.

Not so with a novel. With a novel, even if you work from an outline, you can’t really treat each piece discretely; they are all part of the whole, and sooner or later as you work you are going to have to hold that whole there, in your mind, and all at once. The characters’ inner and outer lives, every last scrap of them, and by that I don’t just mean the part that will end up on the page — the part that ends up on the page is the tip of the proverbial ice berg, thank you very much, the tip you’ve laid down just so, to suggest the shape of the behomoth below the surface — what you must hold in your head is 1000 times more. 10,000 times more — you must hold in your head the world, and the worlds within the world.

Even reading a novel doesn’t come close. When you read a novel you are fed the tip, and from that you make inferences. And inferences are light, and easy to wield — even when they are charged with feeling — it is like watching the worlds from a window.

Much easier.

Writing novels is hard.

Writing novels is hard.

(Somewhat related: the perils of abstraction in writing.)

Why nibbles aren’t enough

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When you’re shopping for an agent, “they” say, you have to query a lot of them. Dozens, anyway.

It’s the “only my mom knows how special I really am” approach to finding an agent. You have this book, you know it’s adorable, now all you have to do is find that one agent out there who can See what’s Really There– the one agent who will Believe.

Then every once in awhile you come across a writer who sent out a few queries and whoops, next thing you know, he/she has offers from multiple agents.

Kristin Nelson blogged today about that experience from her perspective as an agent:

I wish it wouldn’t happen as often as it does but when I see a great project, chances are good that other agents think it’s good too. I offer and the writer mentions she already has a couple of offers on the table.

“When I see a great project, chances are good that other agents think it’s good, too.”

So what’s that say about a project that’s been shopped to, say, 20 agents, or 50, or more, and none have responded with particular enthusiasm? (Assuming, of course, that your query letter is literate and you’ve done your due diligence about which agents you’ve approached.)

It’s not easy to accept the fact that the wonderful book you’ve written isn’t good enough. But agents aren’t dumb. On the contrary, they are the ultimate novel quality feedback machine: they screen novels for a living, they have a vested interest in spotting projects that can sell.

So personally, I’ll know I’ve hit my mark when I have multiple agents vying to represent me. That should be the target, IMO. It’s my target, anyway, I’ll say that.

The answers are in

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Evil Editor has published the answers to his match-the-title-t0-the-synopsis contest.

I picked three right (my picks here). No prize for me! :-)

Here are the fake synopses I contributed:

Little Girl Blue
Will a sex-change operation finally enable a ravishing but desperately insecure house paint heiress to blow her own horn?

The Midnight Diaries
With her carrot supply dwindling, night vision blindness threatens to destroy Angela Fastling’s only defense against clinical depression: journaling in secret after dark.

The Monster Within
Two star-crossed veterinary techs find they have more in common than love when an outbreak of feline tapeworm triggers panic in their once-sleepy town.

Portal to Murder
Desperate for original submissions, a blogging literary agent snaps when her admonitions to “drop the portals, folk” fails to discourage a timeworn sci fi device.

Raise the Buried Dead
Belle Jackson’s photographic memory of local obituaries attracts the attention of Congressional aide Philip Tyler. But why?

EE edited the last one. My version began with the phrase “In this voter fraud thriller.”