Tag Archives: writing

Writing in the digital era

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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!

Absolute Write taken offline

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.”

To blog or not to blog . . .

Posted on by

If you’re a writer-o’-books, the answer to this question is “depends on who you ask.”

Miss Snark has recommended that novelists be cautious about blogging — because when you’re blogging, you’re not working on your novel. But she also wrote, once, that a “well-clicked” blog can be a plus when you’re querying agents.

Late last month, John at Romantic Ramblings recounted the advice he got from his last agent, who told him a blog was practically indispensable.

But John also found a warning on Agent Query that a blog may be a liability rather than an asset for writers looking for representation. (What they are really trying to say, I think, is that a poorly written or presented blog can be a liability. Which is true, I’m sure.)

So now, to add another twist to the conversation, comes this: Joe Garofoli, in the San Francisco Chronicle, reports on how political blogger Glenn Greenwald was able to coordinate online publicity for his non-fic book among his like-minded blogging buddies. The resulting burst of orders pushed his book to number 1 on Amazon.

Granted, Amazon is only one reseller, so if your book is ranked high there, but isn’t selling anywhere else, it doesn’t really mean much.

Except that you get to say your book is a number 1 Amazon best-seller. Certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

So what’s the verdict? I’d say it’s something like this. Don’t blog if you tend to use it as an excuse to avoid doing the real work of writing. Don’t put up a sloppy blog, or a cheesy blog. Don’t present a virtual persona that comes across as loony or raises red flags about your people skills. (Of course, if you have people-skills problems you probably don’t know your blog comes across that way but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.)

And last but not least, remember that blogging is really a type of networking. If it’s going to help you sell books, it’s because of the relationships you’ve built, not because you’ve mentioned your title and now it shows up on Google.

My contest picks

Posted on by

Okay, as promised here are my picks for Evil Editor’s “match the synopsis to the title” contest.

This was hard! I’ll be very surprised if anyone gets even half of them right. At first I was picking the ones that seemed kind of straight, but that can’t be a good strategy, considering how goofy people get when they try to invent what they think will be a saleable novel premise. So I switched my choices on a couple, looking for synopses that have a particularly naive “out there” feel to them.

But of course, the Evil Minions submitting fake synopses were presumably trying to create examples that had that feel . . . so who knows?

Like I said — this was hard!

(And John, I promise I’ll publish which five I contributed as soon as the contest is over! I can’t do it now, tho! lol)

Q1. Spitting Image
13. After a night of drunken stupor, Hal finds himself married to a girl who is identical to a ghostly figure from his childhood dreams.

Q2. Bad Ice
8. Stan Milburn, heist-man extraordinaire, gets more than he bargains for after he steals the cursed black diamonds of Calcutta.

Q3. The Heart of the Tengeri
6. Clarissa trusted rugged jungle guide Will to lead her through the Tengeri rainforest. Will her trust in the gentle stranger lead to danger? Or romance?

Q4. Little Girl Blue
2. When rookie cop Sarah Baxter is sent on her first undercover mission, she must catch the killer quickly… or miss her thirteenth birthday party.

Q5. The Whog Manual.
6. Space Pirate Verna’s newly-stolen starship is a special prototype about to plunge the reluctant thief into an adventure he never expected.

Q6. Commandment
3. Doctor Death, the self-proclaimed lord of crime, finally meets his nemesis: The Deity. Will Death bow to The Deity’s commandment — “Thou shalt not kill!”?

Q7. Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo
10. Pam moved to California envisioning the high life and true love. Dreams don’t  always come true, Pam learns, as she struggles to pay for bread.

Q8. Raise the Buried Dead
3. Nobody ever said voodoo was easy. But when Vance raises a trio of zombies, he finds that undead underlings are more trouble than they’re worth.

Q9. When Sid was Sid
1. Chapters alternate between past and present, as Margaret Divan describes life before and after she discovered her husband Sid, is a transsexual.

Q10. Dressed to Kill
10. A nightclub owner’s plan to have themed costume parties to attract business seems to be working — until she realizes the vampire “costumes” aren’t actually disguises.

Q11. Second Growth
12. A forest fire takes Mary’s family, and her sight. The power of nature can restore the woodlands, but can it give her back her happiness?

Q12. The Midnight Diaries
3. Two kids venture out every midnight to solve crime and help their mom get elected mayor, aided by GPS technology.

Q13. The Innocence of Evil
12. Only Macy Sanders knows that inmate Trey Mitchell doesn’t deserve lethal injection. He’s innocent. But Macy’s fiance knows nothing of Trey. Or of Macy’s past.

Q14. Heart of Desire
3. Vascular surgeon NICK loves JESSICA, but her ailing ticker may “do the newlyweds part.” Nick’s first wife once promised him her heart; is she Jessica’s genetic match?

Q15 Lack of Control
3. An alpha male CIA agent must battle his inner demons and protect a vital microchip from a beautiful and mysterious spy, or millions will die.

Q16. The Island and the Bell
6. Following a plane crash at sea, lone survivor Bob has only a silent bell, found in the wreckage of the plane, to keep him company.

Q17. Bad to the Bone
6. Custom motorcycle builder Danny Irons must prove he didn’t kill the man whose oil-soaked skeleton turns up buried behind his shop.

Q18. Portal to Murder
4. A detective and his attractive partner discover a string of murders caused by a mysterious portal that transports your soul to hell. Even if you’ve been good.

Q19. The Monster Within
7. Anna’s lycanthropy is under control–until she meets Jerome, who inspires all her best instincts and excites all her worst.

Q20. Soulscape
3. Danni knows she’s special. But now she’s involved with a treacherous voodoo priest, and must prove it–on the Soulscape, the realm of the dead.

UPDATE: I didn’t win :D