Clarification, Explanation

October 17, 2010

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

October 14, 2010

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.

Redux: There is No Such Thing as Writer's Block

October 9, 2010

Not quite sure why people are so much more willing to read blogger than live journal as one is just as easy as the other (other than displaying in reader, but we won't get into an RSS feed discussion). Anyway, because it has reared its ugly head again, I feel inclined to repost one of my earlier journal entries on writer's block. It doesn't exist. Stop making excuses.

I can't remember who the author was, someone I respected immensely at the time (Kurt Vonnegut Jr. perhaps?), but I read his opinions long long ago and to this day, I have found them mostly accurate. I say mostly because physical and psychological factors can also play a part in one's writing, so if you're exhausted, overly stressed, or in some other way not prepared to write, it may be frustrating if you're trying to push yourself through. Excluding such instances and focusing directly on writing (when you're in the proper state of self, when you should be writing), there is no such thing as writer's block.

I'll say it again, there's no such thing as writer's block. If you find yourself stuck, unable to move the story forward or unsure of where to go from where you are, you're not "blocked." You've made a mistake. Go back and review what you've written. Somewhere in there is a mistake. When you've corrected the mistake, the story will continue to progress normally. Thus, writing without mistakes will yield a fluid process from beginning to end. Granted, by fluid process, I don't mean that you'll write a publishable book on your first try. There's still revision and corrections to be made. But it's a serious mistake that stops a writer cold.

I have yet to discover this claim to be untrue.

But this is what I do!

October 8, 2010

I went to lunch across the street, diligently working on the revision of TTS (Otwald is about to meet Crown Princess Klara, which will require some serious scrubbing). The owner's wife brings out my food and sees me tapping away on my laptop.

"No more work," she says. "It's time to enjoy ourselves!"

I smiled and nodded, but really just wanted to reply, "This is how I enjoy myself."

This is what I do, lady.

Querying is Scary Shit

September 6, 2010

I like writing fast. I like producing a lot of stories in a short amount of time. I have a lot of stories crammed into this brain, and I'm starting later than I should have in my life (whole different therapy session about why that is). Regardless, I have somewhere between 10 and 30 years left and a crap load of stories to tell. So I write two novels a year. Two a year will get me 20 to 60 novels by the time I'm done, a respectable number that will have demonstrated my storytelling adequately.

Now, I would not write two novels a year if those novels were poor. This isn't some NaNoWriMo deluge of fecal matter with a title on it. I write complete and revised stories that I think others will enjoy. Plenty of authors have that level of output Jim Butcher, Hannah Mosk, etc.) so I don't feel like I'm cheating my story or the writer from finishing the first draft in three months.

Most agent blogs recognize that people write at different speeds, but sometimes still say if you haven't spent X number of months doing revision/letting it sit/critiquing/whathaveyou, you're not ready. Usually X equals a value higher than I will spend on a draft (or sometimes on the entire damn thing). And while I'm normally happy to ignore their comments as something for those authors that spend a year or more writing their novels, I'm starting to wonder if I was wrong.

BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE is weak on protagonist emotional evolution. The reason he does what he does in the end is more gut reaction or spiteful middle finger than any growth. And while that is perfectly possible, I think it shorts him on being a genuine good guy and not just the main character. WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING has a weak subplot with Podome and Nashau's discovery of the truth. If I had let these novels sit, would I have better realized their flaws and been able to affect a revision to correct them before I queried? (Note, neither of these things had any impact on the success of my querying, but you want to present the best possible manuscript when you start the query process.)

So now we come to THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I finished the draft 11 days ago. With the previous two, I think I took a week off (or less) before starting revision. By the time you get to the end of a 150,000-word manuscript, let me tell you, you want to go back and fix everything that no longer works at the beginning. The story evolves. And once you start doing that, you just roll through the whole thing. An 88,000-word manuscript is considerably smaller. The end is much like the beginning. So why am I taking so much time off?

First, TTS's length bothers me. It puts me in a GREAT position in terms of querying agents and appealing to publishers. Paper is a mitigating factor and word-count restrictions have become tight. There are people who wouldn't even consider WCONH because of its length. So this is a good thing. But if feels like I told an incomplete story. Certainly a number of things I had plotted at the beginning never materialized because the story went a different direction. It was originally going to be an intrigue story that turned into an adventure story. 88k feels too short to me. I write fantasy, dammit. Fantasy is long. At least, the fantasy I've always loved is long.

Did I do this subconsciously? Did I write a short manuscript to better my chances for consideration? And in so doing, did I tell a poorer story? I'll tell you write now, I don't think TTS is as good as WCONH. The latter is one of the best stories I've ever told and with a good copyeditor (*cough*DeannaHoak*cough*) would be even more amazing. TTS is a 1-2-3 adventure with its own damsel in distress (yes, I disdain the trope that much that I'd include it in multiple posts).

So, now it's time to revise, but I'm not. Is it because it's a lesser script? If WANTED didn't hack it and that's amazing fiction, how could this make it? Or worse, what if this did make it? What if a bunch of agents asked to read it and offered representation? It would erode my confidence in my own writing and my belief that there's an agent out there that likes the things I like and will see the value in my work regardless of the word count. Maybe I can get some luck with Joshua Blimes. He reps Brandon Sanderson and that guy's word counts are through the flipping roof. I look like a YA book in comparison.

But what if that's not it? What if I'm delaying revising because I want to delay querying. I posted this as a rhetorical question on Twitter and IoMTolly decided to answer. (IoMTolly is a gag account from a blog I follow, Ideology of Madness, which was okay when I thought it was my friend Andrew--you can be an asshat when you've known me for 15 years, but it's not him, so now I'm annoyed). He says that yes, I'm scared. I am, but that's not why I'm delaying. I'm delaying because the ms isn't good enough. Obviously, revision will make it good enough. A first draft is never good enough. Never. Understand that now. Your first draft is shit. Second drafts are where novels are born. But it's only 88k and if someone tells me what a great fantasy it is, I'll have to smack them because great fantasy is longer than 88k. (That is all bias, THE BLACK COMPANY was short, but I think there were some definite weaknesses in the story that might have been fixed with a higher word count.)

But I'm scared? Yes, at least somewhat. No one in his or her right might looks forward to rejection. And if you're querying properly, there will be lots of rejection (don't get me started on the 3/4 of your queries should yield results for more work, bullshit; that's a tirade for a post of its own). Now what IoMTolly has never experienced is querying multiple novels in a year and getting rejected. I didn't query BMBBQ until late 2009, so if I queried by October, I would actually have three novels worth of rejection in a single year.

Rejection is hard. It's cumulatively hard. The first round felt validating. I'm in the process! I'm working the system. The second was much harder. I had written a much better story but got the same results. Worse, other people were mumbling along and getting offers. This is the first time I've written anything, tee hee. I'm fourteen and I'm ashamed I didn't start at twelve, tee hee. These are people you grow to hate not because you know them or they need hating (well, maybe the fourteen year old), but because you hate being rejected. You hate that your work doesn't grab them and say, wow, I want more! You hate being told, you're not good enough.

And let's get one thing straight, publishing is subjective, and a rejection (especially a form rejection which is what you get most frequently) is not a statement on the quality of your work. But when you've run the list of agents to query and they've all rejected you, that feels like a statement of the quality of your work. It still may not be, but that's how it feels. And going through that repeatedly is hard.

Will I stop? Of course not. That's not even a question worth entertaining. It will happen sooner or later (sooner is preferable to later). But I won't lie. Each time I get to this point in the process, it's harder than it was the time before.