It's the little details

I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll say it again: To help your reader believe the fantastic, make sure they recognize the mundane. It's an easy (lazy) hand-wave to excuse inconsistencies in fantasy by saying "this isn't the real world" when so much of the book mirrors the real world. Rarely do we create something newly whole. More often, we take what's familiar and twist and turn it until the picture looks different.

Why? Because if everything was new, the plot would get stuck in the mud of explanation. And in the end, you would resort to comparisons to the things we recognize and the reader simply associates the new thing as the old thing and all your creative effort is a waste. Don't reinvent the wheel. It's round and it works. Reinvent the people and their history and their religions and their culture.

For this reason, I love going to historical events/museums and the like, so I can pick up on the minor details I had assumed were X but proved to be Y¹. That is why I would go to a place like Old Sturbridge Village twice in ten days². For that same reason, while trying to find things Good Ken might find interesting on his vacation, I recommended the mansions in Newport, RI.

The mansions are were the captains of industry gathered near the end of the 19th century for "summer homes" so they could exult in no taxes and exploitative employment practices. (That's not always true, but when you see where the Vanderbilt's "cottage" the Breakers, you'll want to beat them with sticks.³) Having already listened to the main audio tours, I dove into the "aside" tour items, little things they include as extras in various rooms. How did the servants live. What were the obligations of the family's children to society, etc etc. And I took notes. So many notes! So many ideas that I want to incorporate. The way the houses were built, where the placed what rooms and the importance of those rooms and their placement. What servants wore. What the art was painted on⁴, and so on. They even had mini-bath tubs designed for masturbatory purposes. Ingenious!

Perhaps the thing I like most about including these little details is when someone responds, "That's awesome. Wouldn't it have been cool if we had had those in real life?" And then I can say, "We did!"


¹ The basic lesson I've learned is that people weren't stupid. They were quite innovative. They were simply innovative with the tools and technology available to them at the time. Eliminate stainless steel, electricity, and microprocessors and a lot of our ingenuity would start to look much the same.

² For free! Old Sturbridge Village gives you free entrance back to the site within ten days and any new guests get a 25% discount. That's hot!

³ All these places have a lot of gold leaf. There is one room that Vanderbilts...built that the preservation society thought was silver leaf. But that didn't explain why the silver wasn't tarnishing. So they brought in a portable x-ray machine and discovered the patterns were actually platinum leaf. Do you know how expensive platinum was in 1897?!?! And they used it to decocrate their walls!!!!

⁴ We all hear about oil on canvas. So a tour guide was stuttering while pointing out a painting. "Oil on...oil...oil..." and I'm thinking, Canvas, woman! Say canvas! This painting was particularly interesting because it looked like the artist had painted the entire canvas black before starting. While that is a practice, in this case it didn't seem to serve the subject matter. The black was showing through and inhibiting the portrait of the family member. "Oil on ebony." WHAT WHAT? On ebony? HOW AWESOME!!!!

Reevaluating the Briar Patch

I have--to this point--been consistent regarding my opinion of self-publishing and its relevance to my own career. That opinion has not been very positive. For all the anecdotal examples that are bandied about the internet of self-publishing success, the majority of self-published work (in my own anecdotal exploration) is atrociously bad. Of course it is. There are no quality controls on self-publishing. You write it. You publish it. It's out there. It is only as good as your talent, skill, and editing can make it.

Conceding this front, the "self-publishing is the New Publishing" argument has moved to revenue. I've seen Amanda Hocking's name everywhere, but nowhere have I seen an assessment of the quality of her work, only that she's made a lot of money. And despite some popular blogs claiming that the one proves the other, here in this blog we know that to be a load of crap and will not tolerate the claim during intelligent debate.

Having friends who have already self-published, my pursuit of traditional publication was immediately met with questions of why I just wasn't self-publishing. My assertion (and one I continue to make) is that pursuing traditional publishing makes you a better author. While I've always been the best in any group environments I've participated in (classes, organizations, writing groups), this is the big wide world here and the internet has brought the best together. I am not the cream of that pile. Not yet, at least, but that's where I want to be. Self-publishing offers no hurdles, no comparative challenge for me to improve or a yardstick in which to measure that improvement. I want to query, find an agent, and sell my book preferably at auction because I have improved to the point where my work is something worth arguing over.

There is the persistent briar patch of writing and rejection, however. Writing is subjective, every agent will tell you (often including it in their form rejection). It may not be that your query or your book were bad so much as it was it simply didn't appeal to them. With the dwindling number of fantasy agents out there (not counting urban fantasy because I don't write it), the sample size is incredibly small. If your book doesn't appeal to twenty people, you're pretty much done with that cycle.

At the same time, it's an easy excuse to avoid looking critically at your own work. Was it simply a matter of taste or were you not good enough? Was your query bad? Was your book bad? Are you writing derivative, unoriginal work? Are you cliche? Irrelevant? Contrived?

It is a fine line between losing to subjectivity and losing to not being good enough (a line I find most people miss, opting for the latter scenario rather than the former).

Elsewhere in the briar patch is consistent theme or style. Do you pursue stories that run against the grain in that it could find an audience but has greater difficulty finding an advocate in a diminishing market? Are you simply too outside what is accepted? You see that one a LOT. But does that mean it can't be true? Again, a thorny question with an answer that could be one side of the coin or another.

Self-publishing as a response to rejection is avoidance, I think. The answers could be true that you are good enough and just too far out there but that a market awaits you if you only had a chance. Absolutely. But too many people use those excuses for me to ever make such a claim and actually believe myself.

That brings us back to the Konrath/Hocking Paradigm. Self-publishing as a form of superior revenue generation. There's too much anecdotal argument here for anyone not to cling to whatever argument they want to believe. But given the sheer volume of self-publication, I think if it were the superior money maker across the board, that picture would be clearer to all who looked at it.

There's a but to this. You've known it was coming since my first sentence. My company made an announcement on Thursday, one I don't know was public or internal so I won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say, i've had a long-standing opinion of where publishers needed to go to survive the ePocalypse, forming their own markets and improving author royalties on ebooks. The announcement effectively turned us in the opposite direction.

Now, I'm not running around with my arms above my head saying publishing is doomed. For all its glacial pace publicly, privately publishing moves very fast. New ideas begin and die before they ever come to fruition. Five different strategies for the same solution may begin simultaneously, allowing the strongest to survive. This new direction may not make it out of the year. But if it does, if it becomes the norm, I may throw my hands above my head and start saying publishing is doomed.

This is an important moment in publishing's evolution with powerhouses positioning themselves for the future of the industry. For the first time in the past couple years, this is the first time I've seen one of the big six intentionally adjust its strategy in a way I feel cedes market positioning to a rival.

If it continues down this path, the pressure will cause the company to buckle. Amazon's 70% will represent nearly three times the royalty rate offered by traditional publishers while securing its massive dominance of the book market through digital distribution.

Sure the 70% thing's been going on for awhile, but this new pivot has caused me to sit up and take notice. In addition to becoming a better author, I've been pursuing traditional publishing with the expectation that the industry would win out in the end. This is the first sign that I might have bet on the wrong horse.

As such, for the first time ever, I'm genuinely considering self-publishing as a viable course for my career. I'm still querying agents and pursuing traditional publishing, but I'm open to alternatives. I just have to walk through the briar patch and answer some hard questions.

Rewriting is HARD!

I revise. I rarely rewrite. In fact, the only thing I've tried to rewrite is 7TH SACRIFICE and I scrapped the entire incomplete manuscript, so that should almost be called writing, as there isn't much "re" involved.

Coming on a year ago, I finished the manuscript for WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING. I got feedback from an agent who said he would have preferred the story if Bastin and not Nashau had been the main character. This was similar to feedback Elizabeth Poole gave me. But I didn't want to rewrite with Bastin as the main character. Bastin's story's been told before. Nashau's story hadn't. So I tabled that feedback and went on with my other works.

Then THE TRIAD SOCIETY was a near miss. Some of the feedback was there was a particular section that seemed to ramble. In truth, that section had been a shout out to WANTED. The stories are in the same world even though they're not in the same kingdom or with the same characters. I wanted to show the world evolving based on the impact of the stories. Now, I could cut this section, but there are other parts in that section that play directly to the ending (which I don't think the agent ever got to), so I'm averse to cutting it for the moment.

My plan had been, and why I kept that section in there, was once the agent said she wanted to rep TRIAD, that I had another story in that setting that would do well to come out first (yeah, I know publishing doesn't always work that way, but it couldn't hurt to try!). She passed on TRIAD, though, and this was devastating¹. I didn't quite come to terms with getting so close and coming up short like I usually do (granted, I don't think I've ever been that close). So I begin scheming, as hobbits are wont to do. If I can't use TRIAD to sell WANTED, maybe I can use WANTED to sell TRIAD².

I go back and ponder--yet again--what WANTED would be like with Bastin as the main character. But I don't just ponder, I start rewriting it. I delete the first four chapters and look at the story anew.

...

Holy crap, this is better.

...

Holy crap, this is so much better. So I began the rewrite. WANTED wasn't bad before. But in hindsight, it had some water weight to shed. It's the difference between being chubby and being svelt. I've cut 21,000 words so far (actually more than that, but I've written a few thousand new words). My final word count will drop from 150k to something more around 125k maybe 130k. While the reduced word count has diminished the world building slightly, it's a much tighter story in all.

BUT (you knew there would be a but, right?), REWRITING IS HARD! Sure revision is hard, but rewriting is HARD. You have to approach characters fresh. They might not be the people they were before. You need to remember to incorporate the details that your brain is telling you you've already included. You need to not repeat yourself, keep the new plot straight compared to the old plot (chapter 32 is now chapter 12, that impacts everything in between). ANNNND, you have to come to terms with you're writing a first draft of a completed manuscript. How hard is that? You're going to be upset when the stuff needs more polish and you're all like, but I already finished this damn book. It shouldn't be sucking.

But it does suck my friend, because rewriting is hard. Breathe, count to 10, and put your nose to the grindstone. In the end you'll be a noseless author with a rewritten manuscript and a bloody grindstone.


¹ Whenever you're sad after a rejection others tell you that it happens to everyone and to keep on going. This is absolutely true in every sense. BUT, do not think that does not mean you're not permitted to feel down. Absolutely feel down. It's called disappointment for a reason. But you're only allowed so much time to feel down. After that, either start writing or start scheming. I recommend the former.

² Look, remember that part you thought was rambling? Make sense now?³ Wheeeee!!!!

³ It would have made sense before if you had finished the damn manuscript. *pout*<sup>4

4</sup> Stop pouting and acting like a child. Go write your fucking book.