Accept the Crapitude

So, invoking rule 2a didn't have an immediate impact. I chose to finished Bujold's CRYOBURN¹ before getting back to work for a few reasons which I may or may not enumerate below². Anyway, this morning was technically a writing day, but I quickly realized that rule 2a was unnecessary. The writing was crap, but it was a level of crapness that seemed appropriate for a first draft. To stop and revise 40,000 words would reestablish neither voice nor rhythm in a fashion conducive to continuing the work. It was a time sink, a trap. It is the very reason rule 2 exists to begin with.

So instead, I began spot checking. Spot checking being reading while correcting errors I might happen upon. Mostly I refamiliarized myself with the Nation's bad grammar, Jehovah's obsession with family, Sid's foul-mouthed excitability, and Three's lovable innocence. It reminds me how excited I was writing JH before I stopped to revise TTS. It makes me want to write the work again. This is what I needed. I needed to warm up the engine so I could drive in the snow.

It doesn't fix my immediate concern that there's something wrong near where I stopped. I hope that it will come to me soon and I can correct it. Otherwise I'll have to soldier on. And I won't say that I just needed to be inspired again. That's just crap. What I needed was to love JEHOVAH'S HITLIST more than THE TRIAD SOCIETY. That has proved much more difficult than normal (see footnote³ too for hypotheses). While my word count won't be going up today, it may start going up tomorrow, definitely by Friday. Absolutely by Monday or the warning sirens go off.

Either way, it's time for Jehovah to discover the ruins of the Nation's government, meet with racist Rori Schapp (that will eventually lead to the story's thesis statement later in the book when he's talking to Dominic Texas), confront the deputy that follows him, and move the plot along. I want to have this first draft finished by the new year.

The killer? When I get beta feedback for TTS, I'll have to stop again. While I think TTS was served wonderfully for taking a longer break to begin JH before revision, JH seems to be suffering now because of the repeated breaks.

¹ The end of this book would have been crushing to a series fan if Bujold hadn't spoiled it a year ago on her MySpace blog. It's almost enough to cause an AYFKM moment. It's a half-AYFKM, which is why this is only a footnote and not its own post like it almost was yesterday when I read it. It would have been delicious heartache, the kind of thing that Liz would chide me about for months after reading it if I had written it. But I knew it was coming.

² The hardest part of starting JH again was that I didn't want to stop revising TTS. Receiving beta feedback on the first three chapters so soon after finishing my own revision, and seeing how much the novel improved because of that feedback, I wanted to keep going. There are 30 more chapters that need this kind of polish. Let's get to it! But I have to actually let people read the manuscript. ...dammit.

I also think there's a problem somewhere. Maybe Jehovah accepted the Hanged Man's threats too readily. Perhaps he needed to know he was being followed sooner. Even though I understand how dangerous the Hanged Man is and that Jehovah with his obsession with family would absolutely kill five strangers to keep them all safe, I'm not sure if I've properly communicated all of that.

³ I've totally stolen Nate Wilson's footnote gimmick. I commented that it really freed up my writing from those pesky asides. This is proving much more true than I realized at the time. This makes blogging so much easier. Why doesn't everyone have footnotes? Look at how easily I can communicate side-information without obstructing the flow of the main thought. Genius! Pure genius!

⁴ You just went back and looked because you didn't remember there being a fourth footnote. Didn't you? ...I think the footnotes might have just jumped the shark. Shit.

Print is Killing Publishing

Whether you love the smell of paper books or not, digital distribution will be the primary means of accessing text-based media within your lifetime. Three years ago I was in a meeting of department heads and vice presidents and all the people that make decisions on things. We were discussing the company's ebook strategy. Three years ago, Flashpaper was new and xml-ebooks were in their first iteration. We were on the precipice and most people didn't know it.

We're now over the precipice, in case you're wondering. We're falling. Argue all you want that you prefer paper. We'll hit the bottom soon enough.

Flashpaper seems like old hat now. XML is realized (not fully, as we continue to experiment with enhanced ebooks). HTML5 and CSS3 are the vanguard of the mobile revolution, where computers play second hat to smart phones and tablets. The entire publishing paradigm is shifting and those companies that deal with text-based media are trying to figure out how to handle such a rapidly changing market.

At this meeting, standing a the precipice, we discussed the marketplace, the challenges of digital sales, and most importantly, the challenge of pricing. I asked what I thought was a simple enough question: Why don't we just sell content directly to the consumer?

Now at the time, ebooks represented less than 1% of total sales. MUCH less. The industry moneymaker at the time (and currently, though not for much longer) was paper books. Paper books sold in stores and online at Amazon. A book's marketing budget was much smaller than what was needed to force any one particular title to the forefront of the consumer consciousness. So much of the business depended on customers finding the books while looking for other items. (You know the "people who browsed this item also looked at X, Y, Z" suggestions on Amazon? Those are a big deal.)

The answer was as simple as the question. We can't sell directly to customers because it will upset the market. Cutting the middleman out of a particular part of the market would rock the boat for the much larger revenue generator.

In truth, the answer isn't so simple. It is short, but it embodies so many challenges that publishing isn't willing to tackle. How do you set up a marketplace? Which department owns it and maintains it? Will this require new staff and the costs that go along with them? How does a marketplace work? (I cannot express to you the number of meetings I had to have with directors and VPs explaining what meta-text and catalog searching is.) How do you handle international sales? How do you draw users to your market without the goods of other publishers that are offered in the collective of a place like Amazon? How do you establish industry market standards without provoking (more) anti-trust accusations? How do you sell books?

Did you catch that last one? How do you sell books? Publishers are really good at selling books to the market. Publishers are not very good at selling books to the customer. The industry grew up in cooperation with the market, not in opposition to it. Publishers do not have the staff, the institutional knowledge, or the will to bring anything but a marginal effort to bear when it comes to direct selling.

How does that affect you and me? You get the agency model of ebook selling. Ebooks cost as much as their hard-back brethren because the cost still accommodates the middle man. Rather than a 50/50 split between author and publisher, the whole thing is muddled by including a third party to act as a literary fence.

With the inclusion of self-publishing arms and fourth-party catalogs like Smashwords, marketplace e-bookshelves are less accommodating than ever for browsing. There aren't enough ways to hone searches aside from direct keyword searches. If you want to see fantasy, you get sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. And a LOT of it. And a lot of that, self-published. Sure Tor might not represent 100% of the fantasy market, but when you trace so many of the imprints up to their parent corporations, you'd be surprised how many of them are owned by the same people (Penguin owns at least four different fantasy imprints. Tor at least three, and so on). Bundle all these titles into a top-notch database driven search engine, slap a nice marketplace on the front of it, and all of a sudden you don't need to charge $17.50 for an ebook. You can charge $10 and make more money than you ever did before.

With the rapidly changing distribution paradigm, the obligations of playing nice with the market because of print will soon be meaningless. The problem is, by the time that happens, the publishing industry will have given up any opportunity it had to establish itself as a market option for readers of its work, will have allowed Amazon to muscle its way into the industry despite spats with Macmillain (which I still contend Amazon won despite [or because of] the application of the agency model to ebook pricing [something that will bite publishers in the ass]).

The game is being played while we fall. When we hit the bottom, the game ends, the new era of publishing begins, and only one victor will get up and walk away. The more we fall and the more I see the game played, I predict that victor to be Amazon. If decisive action is not taken, publishers, authors, and customers alike will lie broken and bloodied at the foot of the Cliffs of E-sanity.

A Matter of Perspective

My wife and I were passing through Greeley Park a number of years back during a summer art fair. Painters, photographers, and home jewelers displayed their wares. This was back at a time when my then-employer continued to promise me an office. When I passed a small photograph that I absolutely loved and it was only $20, I decided to pick it up. It would be fantastic to put on my desk!

I set it on top of my desk at home with a few posters of New Hampshire (like the flume) where it sat for the next three years. It sat there when I got laid off. It sat there when I took a demotion to work for another company. It sat there when I moved laterally to secure a full time position that would in no way warrant me having an office.

We bought a townhouse and were setting up our home office much like we had before. But this time, a lot of the things we had put on top of the desk were being placed elsewhere. (We gave away a lot of stuff and had some extra space on bookshelves, etc.) Where oh where would I put this picture I love so much? My wife says, why don't we hang it?

*blink. blink.*

The photo is of a dead tree sticking out of the Nashua River. It looks black and white, but it's just a gray day without any color on the trees in the background. It's dark and misty. The water is this opaque force that came up around this tree on all sides and it was trapped there, helpless. (The picture is not online and I can't find the photographer's website because of a Brit with the same name sucking up the SEO [search engine optimization--a term you need to know as an aspiring author]). You've probably seen a tree like this before though, yeah? One that's growing in the middle of the river, and you can't figure out how it got there because it would have had to grow up out of the water and that only works for Aphrodite.)

I ask my wife if she's certain. She tells me yes, she likes that picture too. Really, says I? I would have thought it too dark for your tastes. Dark? says she. I find it to be a very hopeful photo.

*blink. blink.*

How is that hopeful? says I. It's a dead tree!

No, it's a tree that may bloom again. It stands for the hope of rebirth and what may come in the future.

No, it's a tree that had its time and is dead. It stands for the absolute inevitability of the future. We all die eventually.


So the picture hangs on the wall in my home office, meaning two entirely different things to two different people. That's pretty cool.

Beware the AYRTD Bird and Invoking Rule 2a

This has been a reading week. I finished JULIET¹. I'm almost half-way through CRYOBURN. I've finished the first disc of ARABIAN NIGHTS. I keep taking my Eee PC to work because I feel the need to write, but when I think of what to write next, it's not clicking. I know what I need to do, but because I've been enjoying reading, I haven't been stressing forcing myself back into things (60k and JH is complete, a mark I can hit in November if I want to posture for the NaNo writers². What I need to do is invoke rule 2a.

I've done this once before and it proved incredibly effective. Going back to the beginning and revising the current WIP after stopping to revise a completed draft both improves the ms and gets you a feel for the voice and rhythm of the work you're continuing. It's the one time I let myself go back and revise before the entire thing is finished. I updated my first 250 words on Nathan Bransford's forum to JH given how old BM&BBQ is. It seemed a wasted opportunity to post content from that work since I am no longer actively querying it. Those new 250 words needed some serious revision. I overwrote JH's first chapter and couldn't even make it off the first page without scolding myself. (The new 250 words are derived from the original 500 words and are much better.)

So this will let me rebuild a rhythm, improve the existing work, and maybe think of some new ideas for what's still to come. This is only daunting because I don't usually have this much already complete on a novel when I invoke 2a. I have 40k words in JH. Normally I might only have 10. I don't want to get stuck at the beginning and never get to the end. That's the whole reason rule 2 exists!

¹ Not as bad as the AYFKM moment, the AYRTD is when you look at the main character and shout, "Are you really that dumb?" I really enjoyed the first 350 pages of JULIET, but pages 351-400 are just one AYRTD moment after another. The entire climax is impossible if the main character didn't have the mental capacity of a bag full of hammers. She would have realized that everyone had something to gain from manipulating her and no one had been honest, and thus no decision could be made. Thankfully, she chose to mistrust people in a specific order, allowing each of them to shepherd her closer to the finale, leaving the humble reader to ask why he should care about someone unfit to produce offspring less the gene pool continue to be watered down.

Much like the entire plot dependent on the main characters miscommunicating, a plot driven by the protagonist not realizing clues that slap him/her across the face is enough to make me pull my hair out. It's one thing for clues to be cryptic, or riddles or double entendres or genuine intrigue. But when character A gives you a clue and then character B gives you a clue and they both wave the big Clue Flag and you still don't get it? I'm sorry, you're too stupid to have your own book. Go be a supporting character.

² Really, I'm so hard on NaNo because my first experiences with it were from communities not dedicated to writing. I wasn't part of a group of writers that liked to participate. I was among the majority of NaNo participants, people who wanted to write but never found the time. The excuses were the same every year. They'd sign up to do it and then never start or only write for five days or use anything they write (like this blog post) as their word count. Whatever they could do not to do the one thing they said they really wanted to do. Sorry, but if you want to do something, do it.

The Rules (and their Subclauses)

1. One work in progress (WIP) at a time

a. A work may be suspended to revise a draft of a previously completed manuscript or edit galleys of a manuscript being published

b. A work may be abandoned if it is not salvageable and a new WIP begun

i. If an abandoned WIP is resumed, this original work must be stripped for usable content and the manuscript begun anew

2. No revision until the first draft is complete

a. Revision is permitted to re-establish rhythm if a WIP was suspended to revise the draft of another manuscript

3. Do not write a work that does not have a title

a. This title can be changed at any time but may not be eliminated outright

4. Write a minimum of 10,000 words on those weeks that are designated "writing weeks."

a. A non-writing week is a "reading week" wherein a book/books will be read to recharge creative batteries.

5. No more than two consecutive weeks may be designated as a non-writing week, barring extenuating circumstances (e.g. professional obligations, wife in the hospital, etc.)

6. Write chronologically

a. If inspired, write only until this inspiration is spent and place this at the bottom of the WIP until the story reaches the point at which this inspiration can be assimilated
i. If inspiration for a non-WIP work occurs, write a blog post tagged "ideas" to satisfy such inspiration then return to the WIP

7. Do not create a project folder for the WIP until the first draft is complete (this is bad luck).

a. A project folder can be created to store supplementary files (scraps, maps, etc) but the manuscript file must remain in the general "novels" folder of your computer.

8. Copy the manuscript file to a flash drive and secondary storage device every two weeks (or more frequently) to prevent catastrophic data loss in the event of Eee PC theft or destruction

9. Do not show the manuscript to anyone else until it has been revised to second-draft status

a. A second draft constitutes a minimum of one (but may include more) pass that reviews and revises every chapter of the manuscript

10. Do not query agents until the manuscript is revised to third-draft status

a. A third draft constitutes the dissemination to qualified third-party reviewers and the application of their feedback to every chapter of the manuscript

NaNoing My Problem

When I finish revising a novel, I feel like the train from the climax of Back to the Future 3. Doc Brown threw in those special logs and now I'm going twice as fast as a normal train. Reall, that works for when I finish the novel the first time and when I revise it again after beta reading. Each version is relevant to the color in the movie: first draft = green, second draft = yellow, third draft = red. Then I travel through time or fall into a gorge.

And since traveling through time doesn't work as a metaphor, when it's all done, I fall into a gorge. I'm just going and going and going and I don't want to give up any momentum. I try to switch to a different novel, either something I was already working on or something new. The problem is, each novel has it's own voice. I can't maintain that momentum and switch between mss. I need to slow down. But I can't slow down. There's a chemically infused log that is sending me speeding down the track.

I never want to take off, but I always have to. With the completion of TSS's second draft, I had the good fortune of being sick. So even though I wanted to keep writing (and have 38k of JH to go to), I had to take a few days off. Only a few. Monday arrived and I trying to keep some of that momentum going for this wip. It did not go well. I had trouble capturing the voice and had reservations of the quality of the story over all. It feels a bit thin. There's no complexity or depth. It's just a "go here do this, go there do that" story. It reminds me a lot of THE BLACK COMPANY in that way.

So I pondered this on the way home Tuesday night after producing only a few hundred words. I fell into the gorge and didn't realize it. Now I need to climb back up so I can get back on the tracks. But do I stop and try to wash my pants, or do I just soldier on? Yesterday morning I decided to take the NaNoWriMo way out. I ignored any quality concerns I had for the chapter and just pushed through to the end. Sometimes you just have to say, "I'll have to fix this in revision." This risk is that the quality is so bad as to derail the proper direction of the story. You'll just have to come back later and redo it and then redo everything you wrote after. It's a gamble, and not one that always pays off.

Elizabeth Poole and I have differing opinions on NaNoWriMo. She enjoys it. I do not. I accet that she finds a fun community there, but I do not participate in the community and do not want to lend myself to the activity just to explore the community. I think writing without any concern for quality is bad writing. I think 50,000 words counts as a novel in one or two genres. I think not enough effort is made to explain to participants that what they produce during NaNo is not something that should be sent to agents without revision and review. But most of all, it's that first part. No, I do not go back and revise until the entire manuscript is complete, but I do make a concerted effort to write the best possible first draft. To write with complete abandon is to shit diarrhea on the page. It makes a mess, it stinks, and isn't good for anyone but the flies.

I'd rather see someone write 25,000 first-draft quality pages than 50,000 NaNoWriMo quality pages.

So chapter 15 of JH is shit. Hopefully it's not so runny that it was a waste of time. I'm on chapter 16 now, and that's what I needed.

Does Boston Make Me a Bad Writer?

Once upon a time, I had thought to craft a blog post entitled "The New Yorker's Guide to the Rest of the Country." Many of the agents whose blogs/tweets I follow not only work in New York but grew up there as well. They will then jet off to various parts of the country for conferences and conventions and blog/tweet about their experiences there. It is amusing to me that any of these agents should comment on my conduct given their own documentation of their own poor conduct outside of New York, moreover in that they did not understand their conduct was poor. Telling people they are "quaint" is condescending. Ogling a restaurant because you're the only person there is condescending.* Describing to locals how they do not live in New York is condescending. They know they don't live in New York. They aren't confused about their locale.

I grew up in the middle of Missouri, a small city of 75,000 people (plus another 25 grand for the students at the University of Missouri). I went to high school in a town of 35,000 people. I went to college in a town of 12,000 people. From there I have stuck to urban centers: Denver (Lakewood), St. Louis (St. Louis city**), and then the exurbs of Boston (Nashua, NH). To liken to regional stereotypes, I grew up in the Midwest thus I grew up with manners. It doesn't necessarily hold true, as I've met plenty of people from the Midwest who don't and plenty of people on the East Coast that do. But like so many stereotypes, you can find a kernel of truth if you look for it.

In the Midwest, I was often considered abrasive. On the East Coast, I am downright genteel. The fact that I have mastered the use of the words please, thank you, sir, and ma'am, puts me in the upper 1% (the proper Bostonian parlance being the more familiar "Hey guy!"). I opted not to write my thinly veiled chastisement (though I seem to have accomplished that above regardless) and let the New Yorkers act like New Yorkers. I have begun to question my own dissolution of manners vis a vis my experiences on the MBTA subway (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, because you know you were trying to figure it out on your own).

The T, as the subway is known, embodies your classic East Coast experience. The general sense a passenger holds in respect his fellow passengers is "Fuck you." Or more appropriately, "Fuck you, guy." It is not uncommon (and by not uncommon I mean it happens every day) for a person to step onto the subway trolley and stop immediately inside the door, blocking access for the twelve people behind him/her. Nine times out of ten, when people are left on the platform, it is not a result of the trolley being full, but that people did not want to back up to the mid-section where there is no available exit. Or even worse, there are open seats but people are standing in front of them, preventing others from sitting down.

I gave up riding the Orange line during rush hour all together following an incident where a rather large woman (and by large I mean she took up the entire door made for two people to enter/exit at a time), stepped onto the trolley and stopped, blocking the twelve people behind her (I counted). Rather than shouldering past her (as is the norm), there was no place for these people to squeeze past and all twelve of them were left on the platform despite there being room for at least twenty people to board. This was her spot and those people be damned. I was struck with the overwhelming urge to kick her in the stomach, leave her sitting on her ass on the platform while those other twelve people boarded and we celebrated righteous vengeance. This is when I knew I needed to stop riding the Orange line.

Just yesterday a very attractive (to me) woman boarded the Green line and blocked half the entrance. When people pushed past her, she gave them the most disdainful, "how dare you" look. I went from being annoyed to truly loathing her just with that one look. That's when I began to worry. Is riding the T diminishing my ability to write humanistic characters? Will they all be selfish assholes with a pervading sense of entitlement and regional superiority? Can I identify good people? Or is my concept of what makes a person good being so harshly skewed that I'll write books full of nothing but dicks?

I used to spar with a coworker when I lived in St. Louis. From Tennessee, her mother had raised her with outmoded Southern sensibilities. She thought I was a sexist because I did not agree that a man was obligated to pay for a date or that he was obligated to open a door for a woman. I told her she was sexist because she was assigning gender roles and that I, being the gentleman that I am (was?), opened the door for anyone regardless of gender.*** Now I don't let anyone go first. Fuck that guy, it's dog eat dog. Saying please seems to net me all the karma I need out here, so why should I give up my seat to that old lady or let that young man who clearly has never ridden the subway before go in front of me?

Ick. I love New England, and I love with bold letters, New Hampshire. But there are some things about living here I do not enjoy. I certainly hope it does not diminish my own character or my own skills the longer I am here.


*Simple rule: The rest of the country is not a zoo. Do not treat it as such.

**Locals know to differentiate between St. Louis city and St. Louis County. The city is not part of the county--or any county for that matter. And the demographics of the city are much more representative of a poor urban center than of any of the incorporated towns that surround it. A bit of trivia, St. Louis city is one of 11 metro cities in the US that are not part of a county.

***Amusing side-note, a group of us went to lunch. On our way back to the office, I held the door for this woman and the rest of the group (an assortment of men and women). We went up the stairs and another male coworker held the second door that lead to our part of the office. She turned to me and said, "See? He held the door for a woman like a gentleman." In 24 steps, she had forgotten who held the first door for her because she was so sure I was a sexist pig.

I Love My Company

The formula I always say for meeting colleagues in the publishing industry is to take the decade of a person's age (I'm 33, so 3), subtract 1, and that's the number of publishers that person has worked for. It's amazing how accurate that formula is. Publishing is incredibly incestuous in its hiring practices, we list who we've worked for like a pedigree, and few people are satisfied with the first company they work for.

In my case, the first publisher I worked for was particularly nefarious. I am reminded of that fact today because I just sat through the annual health benefits meeting. Every large corporation has them, and the difference between my former employer and my current is like night and day, or really like Douchebag McAsshole vs Captain Awesome von Awesomesauce.

My last health care meeting with DMcA was representative of my last year with the company. They lied their face off, I called them out on their lies in a combative and non-constructive manner. The gist of the meeting was that they were changing our plans. They would cost more, offer less, have astronomically higher deductibles, and cap on services to everything. They followed this up with rhetoric about how much better the plan was for us because now we could have an HSA. I replied that it was better for us only if we did not get sick. This was a highly accurate assessment of the plan.

I skipped last year's health care meeting with CAvA, but because of the health care legislation, I wanted to see what changes might happen. This is where the screws were going to be put to us.

What I saw was not what I expected. This happened to me over the summer too. I missed the town hall meeting last year where the CEO came and spoke because I got lost (hey, I hadn't been working in Boston this year). When I worked for DMcA, CEO visits were a nightmare. They showed us an hour-long PPT showing how much money they made and that they were freezing our salaries, stopping new hires, and not funding forward-moving strategy so they could make more money. I expected much the same and for the first 8 minutes, I saw how much money the company made (in short, a shit load). The remaining 52 minutes were spent explaining our moral obligation to educate the world, the strategies we were implementing to do so, the funding those strategies would receive, and taking vice presidents to task for not being more aggressive in implementing fare business strategies.

I'm not making that up. Read that paragraph again. So what would I see at the health care meeting? This guy wasn't the wicked intelligent, charismatic CEO with the grand vision. This is the guy that manages the nuts and bolts. This is where you squeeze the workers for cost savings.

Oh, when will I learn. First, the guy is funny in his own right. Second, a discussion of cost didn't come until 40 minutes in and it was only one slide long. He started with "Our biggest expense is high-value illnesses like cancer, so we're changing policies to make it easier for employees to receive preventative care." Yes, my company actually uses common sense. Rather than limiting health care access to reduce costs, it increased front-end expenditures to reduce larger expenditures for untreated illnesses. 100% preventative coverage, free cancer screenings, and distributing free copies of a popular nutritional author who happens to be published by our trade division. Total costs are rising marginally, but the services my company offers me is improving across the board.

This is how corporate America should act. This is the ethical and responsible relationship a company should have with its employees. This is Captain Awesome von Awesomesauce. I love my company. It is the greatest place in the world to work.

And at the very end of the presentation he dropped the bomb. Because of new health care legislation, my company's health plan is considered a Cadillac plan. Come 2018, the company will have to pay the government $80 million a year to continue offering this level of coverage to its employees. What? No! This is how a responsible American business should treat its employees. They should all be doing this. The company will not consider an additional $80mm charge to its annual health costs. So it will instead be forced to reduce benefits to fall outside this range.

Dammit Congress. I'm annoyed, but am not worried. The current health care legislation will not be what is implemented in 2018. Still, what the hell. You could quadruple my salary and I still wouldn't make the "rich people are bad" $250k. What are you doing taxing my health care?

What if Books Were Like TV

Following the recommendation of many, many people, I finally got around to renting the first disc of season 1 of "White Collar" (that's the USA show that stars Chuck's Bryce Larkin as a conman working for the feds). I have to say, the pilot really hooked me. It wasn't as flimsy as I thought it was going to be. Characters got some depth and there was a really interesting supporting cast.

One of my favorite things to do with television is to watch a series pilot and then see what changes when the pilot is picked up. For those of you that don't know, a pilot is shot and given to the studio to determine whether they're going to pick up the show for a season (or a half season or a handful of episodes, etc). This means, a pilot may be good enough to get the series picked up, but certain tweaks happen when the series begins, usually with the supporting cast or particular character traits.

(Look at Agent Gibbs' team when he appears in JAG compared to when NCIS became its own series. Those people are never mentioned again. Likewise, compare how much pop culture Gibbs knows in Yankee White compared to the rest of the series.)

What amuses me the most about this juxtaposition is that the show so rarely acknowledges the people that are no longer there. They might get a one-line good-bye if they're acknowledged at all. Or, if the effect they have on the plot is relevant (such as June giving Bryce a place to stay), that effect may remain while the character vanishes.

Can you imagine what it would be like if books were like that? More and more, authors are gimmicking out the book-by-chapter sales. Or the choose the direction of the story contests. Can you imagine what it would be like to read a story where certain characters are determined not to be best and just abandoned or completely retconned in later chapters?

Is it because it's in print that we'd be upset? Or is it just that television has done it for so long that we're used to it? I can't imagine reading a book where a secondary character is replaced by a similar but distinctly different character in chapter 5 without explanation. Or perhaps we accept that the entire story is told in a book and the author is given time to go back and revise; whereas, it would not make sense to reshoot a pilot episode with new characters. Still, I always want to turn the network and say, "You know I see that. Right? I see the difference."

Sometimes it's actually a good thing. Some characters don't work or the writers threw in the kitchen pot trying to make the network like them, and you get the most ridiculous characters. Sometimes, like in the case of Burn Notice, it's a step back.

I liked the pilot cast. I was actually shocked at how progressive it was. Sure the two leads were both white males, but the supporting cast was four black people and two white people. Of those six people, four of them were women. And of those four women, one of them was a lesbian. As American television goes, that's a whole lot of minority for a non-minority focused show.

By the third episode, we're down to two women and two men. One of them is black and one is latina, but the lesbian is gone. Now IMDB tells me June and Diana come back, but I'm disappointed at the loss of Denise Vasi's Cindy. I thought she acted well, I liked her confidence, and it was nice having a female that would be totally immune to the charming main character's whiles. I also appreciated how little emphasis they put on her sexuality. Too often the "gay" character requires quotes because the writers make such a big deal of it that it becomes a distraction, as if gay people aren't capable of working in a normal, every-day environment.

I'm not sure if I'll stick with this show. The episode I just watched failed pretty horribly as a procedural. And actually it failed worse than normal. It made an effort to point out that FBI Agent can't use the gold coin because it was obtained illegally, but then a confession is taken based on the stolen gold coin. Any evidence deriving from illegally obtained evidence would be thrown out. The entire episode is a road map of how to let two criminals escape any kind of prosecution.

If you're going to be a procedural, you have to get your procedures close enough to the truth that the armchair-lawyers don't see the gaping hole you drove your plot through.

Clarification, Explanation

I changed my twitter profile recently from "I write." to "I write in the morning. I make ebooks all day. I write in the evening. I do other stuff." There was some confusion to this statement. It was presumed that I self-publish in ebook format, and that is not the case. I work for a publishing company as a media project manager. One of the things I am responsible for creating is the ebook (in its many formats, pdf, xml, flash, etc). I changed it because in the pub-o-sphere, the paradigm of agents giving advice to aspiring writers, they can forget that we have day jobs too. I have eight years in publishing, six of those in media production. I have participated in the creation of estrategy and worked the guidelines for xml creation from typeset PDFs of finished books. So, you can imagine, when an agent tells me I'm wrong about ebooks, it grinds my gears. The closest an agent will get on the production side is perhaps giving feedback on a cover. When it comes to this part of the business, the paradigm is reversed. There is a caveat to all this.

On my website, I list the jobs I've held. At the bottom of the list is my current job in educational publishing. My web presence elsewhere is part of the trade publishing community, blogs, twitter, just like how all of you found me at one point or another. In that environment where there is a limit to characters or an amount of time you can make your point before readers go on to the next post, I leave off the "educational" because most people don't understand the difference. I also say I work for a big 6 publisher because I do not want to say which publisher it is and there isn't a term any of you would understand otherwise. I do work for the parent company of one of the big six. I am in their higher education division rather than their trade pub division.

Here's why this matters: 1) The acquisition of trade titles is different than the acquisition of education titles. For all my bad experiences with a perpetually late editorial staff that has no understanding of production or media (of which there are many), I have no basis to claim the same for trade.

2) I do not want it to appear as if I am intentionally deceiving people or suggesting that I have a role in trade when I do not. I have never worked in trade and never intend to do so as anything but an author.

Here's why it doesn't: 1) In corporate strategy sessions, technological strategy often has to take into account both sides of the business. Efficiency is always the key word and a method I use for making my ebook is highly likely to be used on the trade side as well. Disparate systems cost money!

2) Print and media in general are established workflows that are not affected by what they are publishing. Printing a book is printing a book. You need to know your trim size, your paper weight, your final page count, the weight of the paper for the cover, and various milestones for your schedule. The subject matter of the book doesn't matter. The printing process is the same. The same is true for media. An enhanced ebook is an enhanced ebook. File format matters MUCH more than subject matter. Is this thing for Kindle? Nook? Our own proprietary ebook viewing system? The skill set I have in media transfers 100% to trade.

So there you go. Full disclosure. I work for the largest publisher in the world. So often people say largest and they're just talking about trade, when in fact they should consider trade and education. It actually obscures a lot of "predictions" on where publishing is going because people only focus on trade. Educational publishing puts trade publishing to shame. So when you think, oh no, ebooks are going to kill publishing. I laugh. I laugh heartily. Trade publishing is having difficulty adjusting to ebooks, but Education has been pushing as hard as it can for years to get to this point. The ebook revolution is a gold mine for educational publishing. Where does educational publishing lose the most money? Not piracy. Used book stores. How do you sell an ebook to a used book store? Exactly. A collapse of the trade division of my company would see total yearly revenue drop by only 25%.

The end of publishing? Oh no, my friends. This is only the beginning.

(Technical note: The information in this post is stated as personal observation and without review by my HR department. The information is non-proprietary and represents experiences gained working at two separate publishing companies over the course of 8 years. Chill.)

The Satisfaction of Success

I am a success!

What? Did I get an agent? No. Did I get an offer of publication from a major publishing house? No. Did I get a date with Rosario Dawson? No.

Yet I am still a success. I have not accomplished any of the above professional goals (and if I never accomplish that third one, it'll probably go a lot smoother with my wife), but I have done the thing I perhaps love the most. I finished a novel.

This feeling right here, the mix of excitement and euphoria, is the big pay off for me. It's not the completion of the first draft. That's just a step in the road. It's finishing the revision where I feel confident enough in the manuscript that I can send it to other people to read. Of all the works that I have finished (and even JEHOVAH'S HITLIST, which isn't complete), I felt THE TRIAD SOCIETY was my weakest offering. One of the reasons I continued on to JH instead of TTS was because I was unenthusiastic about he ms. That extra time helped a lot, though, and I realized a lot of my mistakes. I tweaked here and fixed there and made one massive change (Herman to Annelie) that made all the difference in the world.

I just took something mediocre and made it great. ...or at least better. Good enough that I'm happy with it, feel it's representative of my talent. I have accomplished my main goal. That is a great feeling.

So whether my current partial leads to a full and (fingers crossed) leads to representation, it's not as important as what I've done write now. I wrote a novel from start to end, and I think it's good. I hope you get the chance to read it, and that you enjoy it too.

The Importance of a Name

THE TRIAD SOCIETY is a pre-steam punk fantasy. What does that mean? That means steam technology is in its early advances. I don't have airships or the like. I have steam-infused water and other similar "inventions!" Reliarach is the first kingdom on the Crescent Sea to develop such technology, the other six kingdoms being in the technological dark ages (a pun!). The king of Reliarach is Urban.

Urban.

The entire story is set in a city where this new technology and its resultant socio-economic impact is tearing everything apart. And I named the king Urban. I wanted to name the king Urban as soon as I decided that I would include a king in the story. Only after the fact did I think it was a cute nod toward the atmosphere I was developing. And after that, I never thought on it again.

Not until now. A beta reader commented that the name was like beating him over the head with the message. OH NO! I hate that. I do not like to be beat about the head or have my ears boxed or any other physical violence from messages. That leads to AYFKM moments!

So now I have to ponder and ponder hard. Is this one person's reaction or should I change the name. I really like King Urban, but at the same time, I will not beat my readers about the head with a name. Twould be akin to beating them with a fish, and no one likes that.

Trading at $1,365.00 an ounce

A good beta reader is worth his or her weight in gold. As of closing October 13, 2010, gold traded at $1,365 an ounce. An ounce is equal to 1/16 of a pound. (2.2 pounds equals 1 kilogram for you metric folks.) Assuming Elizabeth Poole weighs about 110 pounds (when she's soaking wet maybe), that means she's worth $2,204, 400.

Yesterday's exciting news is that an agent that appeared on the infamous List asked for sample pages from THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I wore myself out yesterday doing the Dance of Joy. But when I came to my senses, I realized I was unprepared! The thing is still in revision. It hasn't even gone to beta readers! I should email her and say sample pages will have to wait (this request came outside of the normal querying process as a result of the sample pitch paragraph submitted as part of the webinar I mentioned previously).

NO WAY!

I'm not waiting. This thing says I have seven days to submit the first 30-35 pages. They'll then take two months to review those pages. I can revise the first 30-35 pages in seven days (already finished first pass) and the remainder in two months. No problem. There's no reason to delay here. The thing will be done and polished before they (undoubtedly) ask for the full manuscript. I've revised 29/33 chapters already. Pretty much all I need is the beta read/revision. So if my beta readers can review the first 30 pages right now, this balls a rolling!

Sara Megibow has expressed her frustration at fantasy authors glutting the early chapters with world building. The reason I'm doing a second pass before beta? I'm worried I did the same thing. There are a few paragraphs in chapter one and a section in chapter two in particular that I think need to be moved or cut all together. Without saying any of this, I send the ms to Liz and she pings the EXACT chapters I was worried about AND the EXACT section I was worried about.

That's not just skill. That's peace of mind. Now I can skip worrying whether I was being overly strict with myself or risking this great opportunity by submitting something I was on the fence about (I liked the world building, but it mucked up the pacing a bit). Now I know. It wasn't me being hard on myself. It was me seeing a problem (not a glaring one, those are easy to pick out. The subtle ones are harder). I need to tool this stuff for the betterment of the story. I have confirmation. I have peace of mind. And that is invaluable.