There are a few items about staying on task and trying to finish the current book. I think a lot of writers today can relate. We just had a discussion in our writing group the other night about what we’re thinking of doing next. It’s only natural; you can get bogged down in a novel and sometimes you need a break. And when a writer is taking a break, a writer has to write, so sometimes you start the next big thing. Personally, I try to fill my breaks with short fiction writing: nice, bite-sized chunks. Great for getting that sense of writing accomplishment and then moving on and going back to the Damn Novel.

Of course, a few of these commandments are out of my realm of possibility. I’d love to have a rigid work schedule, but with a day job that doesn’t always start exactly at 9am and end at 5pm, it’s not easy. Even so, I can’t overstress how important it is for me to at least try to touch the work in some way every day. I aim to hit it briefly in the morning before work and then again in the evening. By planning for two writing appointments, I usually hit at least one of them.

Looking at the time that these work program commandments were written (1932-1933), I wonder if Miller was trying to finish Tropic of Cancer (published in 1934), and having already started Black Spring (which was published in 1936) he was trying to avoid working on that or anything else. According to his autobiographical timeline, in 1933 he “Began book on Lawrence which was never finished.” Nonetheless, commandments can be helpful even if they’re occasionally broken!

In any case, it’s obvious that Miller’s list was written for himself and not meant to be advice for everyone. I’m thinking about making my own list of commandments as I try to finalize my second novel (tentatively called Crossfade).

Has anyone else handed themselves down an edict from on high?

Recently, I’ve been revising and editing my next novel (working title is Crossfade, probably going to change at some point). Since the beginning, I’ve had a hard time pinning down the genre. Science fiction, magical realism, paranormal, noir, neo-noir… what the heck is this book? Do you other writers ever have this problem?

In my book, the main character is a Private Investigator. As a result, right off the bat many readers naturally peg the novel as noir/hardboiled detective. However, although there is some “hardboiled” imagery in the story, the protagonist is far from the classic hardboiled PI. If anything, he’s soft-boiled. He shies away from violence, he spends more time daydreaming than actually detecting, and he relies on his wife’s steady job to pay the bills. Are you familiar with the mystery novel where the main character has a seemingly ordinary and un-adventuresome job, like being a wedding planner or a librarian, and they stumble into a big mystery and find their calling: that they should have been a detective? This character is the guy who became a detective and really had no calling for it, and is in fact not all that great at it. So when the big mystery comes his way, he doesn’t exactly take to it like a duck to water, but rather like a cat who wonders why the hell he moved to a pond in the first place.

What isn’t Science Fiction?

The storyline progresses into the weird, and eventually falls into what I would call “soft science fiction”. Of course, the definition of the term “soft sci-fi” varies depending on who you’re talking to. I’m using it to refer to the soft sciences – psychology, sociology, and so forth – as opposed to the hard sciences of physics and chemistry and so on. In particular, there are psychological elements in this story which lead to a “questioning of reality”. My fear is that by using “sci-fi” anywhere in my description, I might end up saying the novel is “noir/science fiction”, and you’ll probably think of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (in film form as Bladerunner) or some other cyberpunk-ish work. Not that I don’t love that stuff (because I do), but this book Crossfade is nothing like that.

And here comes another issue with genre: there are many arguments for calling a great deal of things science fiction, even if they don’t have aliens and laser guns. Many people who read and write science fiction don’t have a problem calling The Road or The Time Traveler’s Wife science fiction, but people who want to sell these books to a broader audience prefer to keep their distance from that label. Marketers like it when genre-labels refer to a static list of characteristics and they don’t want to get philosophical about the multitude of thought experimentation that permeates much of fiction (and leads some of us to make all kinds of correlations with the science fiction genre).

Genre first or genre later?

In various writing circles, I’ve heard valid arguments both for and against identifying your genre from the onset. I’m going to boil the arguments down and massively over-simplify: if you want a marketable book, know your genre. I don’t say this because I think marketing as an act or a profession is inherently shallow (as might have come off in the previous paragraph). Marketing is a matter of focusing your efforts and finding your audience. Genre labels exist so that we as consumers can relate one work to another; if you liked this, then you might like that. And when you know what genre you’re writing for, you can do your research and figure out what it is that readers are looking for when they read that particular genre, and make sure you are meeting those needs.

On the other side of the fence, there are those who would rather just focus on the story they want to tell, and to hell with whether it fits in a pre-established box or not. Some would argue that this attitude gives birth to new genres (or at the very least, sub-genres and cross-genres). However, when you don’t fit into those pre-established boxes, you’re going to have a heck of a time when it comes to marketing your work.

Lesser known genres: Surrealism, Magical Realism, Transgressive

With Crossfade, I originally intended to write a pretty straightforward detective novel with a paranormal twist. Art being what it is – a living, breathing animal – the story evolved in a way that incorporated influences from (soft) science fiction (yes, I read a lot of Philip K. Dick). Frankly, I found it difficult to write the always-on, hardboiled detective character, so my protagonist changed quite a bit from my original intention, becoming introspective and much more flawed.

It wasn’t until after I finished my first draft and began revising that I got around to reading Haruki Murakami. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is considered by many to be “surrealist” or “magical realism“. Though the style of what we now call magical realism has been around for quite some time (going back to Kafka in the 1920s), it seems to have had a resurgence lately in contemporary fiction. Works of magical realism are those that have some unreal element in them – something out of the ordinary – that is taken for as real/ordinary in the world of the story, usually without need of explanation (like you might get in sci-fi) or historical/mythical/spiritual context (like you might get in fantasy). I’ve also heard the term slipstream to refer to similar characteristics, though it seems to be rarely used.

It’s easy to confuse surrealism with magical realism, especially in works like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Surrealism tends to be more psychological and imagination-based, not connected with material reality. A key characteristic of magical realism is acceptance of some unreal concept by the characters and the world of the story. I could ponder these subtle differences all day long and start to think I could tell one from the other, until I read Murakami, and then I think there is a kind of fiction that can be both surrealist and magical-realist.

In any case, there’s no doubt that the style of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle had a significant influence on the hacked-and-slashed second draft of Crossfade.

I’ve often been a fan of Chuck Palahniuk’s work, and I think I could argue that some of his fiction falls under the “magical realism” label. However, most of his fiction is considered transgressive. I think this is less because of the foundation of his plots (which could easily fit the magical realism description) and more his subject matter involves so much of the “taboo”, including sex, drugs, and liberal amounts of violence. He also writes with a minimalist style, which is more common to that transgressive than magical realism.

Define you genre by style or subject matter?

And now I come to the final dilemma. The easiest way to identify genre is to look at the story’s subject matter and setting. If the whole thing takes place in outer space, then it’s probably science fiction. If the main character is a private investigator, then you’re looking at noir/hardboiled detective.

The problem is that when you cite a genre based on subject, you inherit an expected style of writing. Noir is typically fast-paced, minimal, and anchored in realism. Stories under the broader mystery genre are usually very heavily plot-driven, as opposed to character-driven. What I’ve got here is a slow-moving, heavily introspective novel that I fear is quite anti-noir at times.

So tell me what you think. Has anyone had success identifying their genre long after the book was finished? Have you ever tried to “fix” a story so that it more properly fits into a particular genre slot? Or do you think it doesn’t matter as much, given that the majority of the reading audience has never even heard of terms like “magical realism” or “transgressive fiction”?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post giving a few tips on how to plan for NaNoWriMo. Now as mid-month (25k words) approaches, I want to share seven tips for sticking it out and going the distance.

1. Grab your notebook and pen.

There are a lot of good reasons for writing by hand (like the ones noted in this recent article at Guardian UK Books). Your brain thinks differently when you’re writing with a pen than it does when you’re typing. Sometimes slapping the laptop closed and grabbing a pen can give you just the shake-up you need to get motivated. Also, having a portable notebook on your person at all times means never losing the thoughts you have when you’re away from your computer. Those precious thoughts might turn into entire scenes, but you have to remember them first, so jot them down!

2. Write morning, noon, and night.

This one is hard, but so rewarding if you can pull it off. If you work a day job like I do, you’re probably saving writing time for the evening — which just happens to be the time of the day you’re at your most tired! So I try to sneak in a few hundred words first thing in the morning with my first cup of coffee. When I’m in the zone, I’ll use my lunch break to sneak a few hundred more in. Not only does it cut down on the word count looming over me in the evenings, it keeps my head in the story and the characters. Even if you don’t work a day job, splitting up the load into different parts of the day makes some days so much easier to hit that word count.

3. At least something every day.

Speaking of keeping your head in the story and the characters: try your hardest to write a few paragraphs every day. There’s very little doubt for most of us that we’ll have days where we don’t get to 1,667 words. Sure, you’ll make that word count up on a different day (I know you can do it, because I did it!). But it’s ever so much easier if you at least get something down each day. Even a couple of hundred words is better than nothing. And it’s not just about the count: it’s about keeping your head in the story so when you come back to it, you don’t have to backtrack. Trust me — when NaNoWriMo is said and done, this is one of the lessons you come away with.

4. Leave yourself a clue.

This is probably one of the simplest and most effective tips on here. When you get done writing for the day, write one more sentence. It doesn’t have to be a real sentence — just a reminder to yourself about what’s going to happen next, or how a character is feeling, or anything like that. Just leave yourself a little clue so that when you come back the next day, your head is right back in the story. Why so many tips about keeping your head in the story? We live in a world of distractions. Our jobs, families, friends, homes, chores, pets, appliances: all are sources of distraction. Distraction is a fact of life. Learn to work around it instead of letting it defeat you. This tip is just a way to distract yourself from your daily distractions… by making you think about your story again when you sit down to write!

5. Recharge with reading!

Yes, read books! You’re writing a book! Part of the reason I make this suggestion has to do with my feelings about how badly television affects my writing, so when I’m in write-mode, my entertainment needs to be read-mode and not watch-TV-mode.

And to be honest, during a time of such intense writing, reading short stories might be even better than novels. You can pick and choose and get more variety of voice, style, genre, setting, character, etc. You won’t get hooked into losing several hours in a night because you’re reading some page-turner of a novel. And if you’re one of those types that’s always afraid your writing is going to come out just like the current novel you’re reading, well then short stories let you hop around from author to author, broadening the influence on your writer-brain.

6. Rewards are key.

Make procrastination work for you! Karen E. Peterson’s book Write: 10 Days to Overcome Writer’s Block. Period. talks about how writer’s block is more or less a result of the two halves of your brain working against each other (which just makes me think of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly). When you’re trying to take charge and sit down and write, sometimes your right brain is rebelling and saying, “No, let’s not write… let’s do X” (examples of X: watch TV, play video games, go to the bar, or even read something fun and distracting). So what can you do? One thing you do not want to do is say, “Okay, Righty — we’ll start with dessert and then after we do X we’ll get some writing done.” I think we all know how that story ends. So instead, we have to tell our right brain this is a work-reward situation. “Listen here, Righty — if we sit down and write for no more than an hour or a thousand words, whichever comes first, after that we get to go do X.” I can’t believe how well this works.

7. Change your environment, change your mind.

Go for a walk, go to a cafe, go to the library, heck, go to a bar. Some of these places are distracting, I know, but I truly believe that part of doing NaNo is learning how to write with distractions. Besides, sometimes your brain needs that chaos to wallow in; sitting in the middle of a cafe or bar while people are all around you socializing; if your brain can learn to be creative under those conditions, you’re going to feel invincible.

So there you go. Did I forget anything? What are your tips for surviving NaNoWriMo?

NaNoWriMo is one of the best ways for an aspiring writer to kick themselves in the butt and take their writing to a whole new level. Before NaNo, I could never get more than 20-25k words into a book before I petered out and gave up. I won NaNo in 2009 and again in 2010, each time just crossing the 50k finish line, and I did it while working a full time job.

Part 1: Planning your Story

Got a few things you’ve already started working on? A few thousand words head start? That’s great – but you’re not going to want to hear this: don’t use them. Start fresh. There are two reasons for this: One; if you’ve started something before and hit a rut, you’re going to start November in a rut. Two; when you started your last novel adventure, it was the book you really wanted to write. NaNo is not for writing that book. NaNo is an experiment. You’re already putting pressure on yourself by attempting to write 50k words in 30 days, so take a little pressure off and come up with a story idea that has a little less history for you. A new idea; one that if it fails you won’t care about so much. This advice might turn some people off, but I truly believe that NaNoWriMo is not about writing a novel – it’s about learning how to write a novel. It’s about learning how you write. And remember – just because you start with less pressure doesn’t mean you won’t be proud of the result.

If you’re going to survive the month, riddled with writer’s block and distractions, you need a solid plan. I’m not going to give the secret formula for writing a complete novel: there are plenty of books out there on that subject, each describing techniques that may or may not work for you. Yes, it’s true – some writers can start from scratch and write until a book is done with very little planning. These people are sometimes called pantsers (as in, they write by the seat of their pants); if you’re doing NaNoWriMo for the first time, you’re probably not – or should not be – one of them (otherwise you’d have written a novel or ten by now).

So do yourself a favor and do a little planning. Without trying to box you into a formula, I’ll mention a couple of key things that can help in this regard:

Characters

I start with this for a reason – most novels are character-driven. When you fully plan your characters, you’ll be amazed at how much of the story comes from their backgrounds, their motives, their desires, their fears, etc. Giving some depth to your main characters helps you break out of cliches and stereotypes. At the very least, for each main character you need to know:

• Name (make sure you like it or you’ll be search & replacing later)
• Age
• Physical description (I like to doodle them; no one is going to see my terrible drawings, but it helps solidify a purely imaginative character in my mind’s eye; sometimes I collect photos of strangers – it helps!)
• Occupation
• Education (training, upbringing, etc)
• Family: parents (living or dead, what were their occupations) and siblings (younger or older and occupations). There’s always a temptation (in particular if you’re writing anything action/adventure/thriller/etc) to leave parents out; they become a liability, and sometimes we might like to pretend we’ve grown up to be independent human beings that act of their own free will, with no influence (positive or negative) from those that raised us. Even if your character’s parents died young or if your character was adopted, then someone raised them (even if that someone was a pack of wolves). Of course, being raised by someone other than your biological parents in and of itself could be a central theme of your whole storyline.
• Arc: Last but not least, you need to have an idea of how your characters are going to change, or how they are going to refuse to change throughout the story; in other words, the character arcs.

Setting

Seems obvious – obvious enough to overlook. Just write it down: the where and the when. Rural, urban, real world, fictional world, past, present, future? If you’re doing anything other than real world places that you have lived in and in the time periods in which you lived there, then you’ve got some inventing and/or researching to do. Get as much of it down as possible; you don’t want to run into a roadblock halfway through your story because you don’t know some key bit of information about your setting. And remember, setting isn’t just location and time period – depending on your story, it might include cultural identities, political environment, racial diversity (or lack thereof), class diversity (or lack thereof), even the weather.

Plot

How different writers plan their plots varies all over the map; and there are tons of books that describe success-guaranteeing methods. The good news is, NaNo is going to help you learn which plot-planning method works best for you.

I like to create an outline, breaking the story into a few key moments that get me from the beginning to the end. Then I do one or two sentences each for the first 5-10 scenes. When I’m actually writing, I can go a few days just following my own outline, and I can easily adjust as I go. I always make sure I have at least the next 5 scenes or so planned out before I move on. This is a big motivator for me: When I know where the story is going, I never have a problem with writer’s block. Even if you get stuck in the middle of a scene, you can always skip it and move on – you can always come back later. Yes, you’re allowed to do that! Heck, you can even write the last third of the book first and then start from the beginning and back-fill.

Perspective

Here’s another one that seems obvious, but trust me, you need to make sure you’re happy with your decision before you start. Basically, you need to decide if you’ll be writing in the first person or the third. Let’s take a look at the differences:

• First person: You can get very in depth into one character this way, describing their thoughts and motives throughout the story. This is NaNo, so this perspective can actually allow you to cruise through word count pretty quickly, because a character can ponder loquaciously page after page. However, when it comes time to edit, you might end up taking big chunks of the inner voice out because it often slows down the movement and the progression of the plot. The other major warning about first person: if at any point, you want to know another character’s views and motives, they either have to declare them out loud (or in writing or whatever) or the main character has to speculate. This is often a good, challenging restriction to place on yourself as a writer, but you need to be aware of it up front in case that’s just not going to work for you and your story. One last point about first person: yes, it’s possible to do multiple first person perspectives. I’ve read a few books written this way and I’ve enjoyed them very much; but I’d venture a guess that it’s not easy to pull off for a beginning writer.
• Third person: With this perspective, there are actually a couple of sub-categories. I’m not an expert in this stuff, but I can tell you what I think is important to know when planning for NaNo. There are two ways this can go: First, you can write in the third person, but from the perspective of one or more characters. This is a good way to go if you have one to few central characters that you’re going to need to use to tell the story. Think of it like you’re standing over someone’s shoulder. You aren’t seeing the world through their eyes totally, but you get a sense of what they are thinking and each scene moves along in their single perspective. That last part is important, so I’ll repeat it – if you’re going to do it this way, you need to be consistent – don’t change shoulders mid-scene (in your outline, when you’re mapping scenes, designate a character to be the lead over-the-shoulder perspective in each). The second way of doing perspective is to go more omniscient, where the whole story is more of a TV-camera view. It sounds the easiest and the most natural way to go, but you can’t really get too much into a character’s head without making the perspective confusing. And let’s face it, are you writing a novel or a script?

Tense

I left this for last because it really is the least important. Most of us are used to writing in the past tense, and that usually works fine. Personally, I’ve fallen in love with the present tense lately – I find it adds an element of tension, as in, the narrator or storyteller isn’t looking back on a whole book of what has already happened, but instead is discovering everything at the same rate as the reader. Be careful if you’re going to try present tense: You’re going to spend a lot of time rewriting sentences that came out in the past tense.

With regards to the last two sections, Perspective and Tense: what’s the best way to decide? Practice, of course! Come up with a scene or two – it doesn’t have to be interesting, just something with dialog and maybe a bit of action (or a lot of action) – and write it a few different ways. Change the perspective, change the tense. You want to find a combination that works best for telling the particular story you are telling, but more importantly, you want a combination of perspective and tense that you are comfortable with.

So that’s Part 1 of Surviving NaNoWriMo, the planning. I’ll be back with another post of just general tips for getting through the month of November.

Seems like every morning I get up and look around and there are more articles and blog posts about how the landscape of publishing is changing. In many ways these are scary times, but in other ways they are very exciting times.

Competition for the Big Six

Let’s start with this CNN article: “Amazon’s grip tightens on the entire book-publishing chain”

“Amazon is holding the entire book industry hostage,” says Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association. “First they disintermediated retailers, and now it’s publishers and authors.”

Yikes! Next they’ll “disintermediate” the last middle-man – you know, that pesky author – and the chain can be just Amazon and Consumer. But seriously, seems like chopping out the steps between authors and readers is a good thing, isn’t it?

Teicher says the issue isn’t about progress — it’s that Amazon is “using the book industry as a loss leader to get people to buy TVs.”

“Book buyers are good consumers, and Amazon knows that,” Teicher says. “So they get drawn in and then encouraged to buy different products. Meanwhile Amazon’s hurting the book industry for the sake of profits.”

Amazon enjoys being a “one stop shop”, no doubt about it, but I think the ABA has it all backwards. Amazon’s been a one-stop-shop for a long time now. I’m a little skeptical that by publishing a few books and pricing them a few bucks cheaper than books published at “agency pricing” Amazon is going to lure in new customers and sell them TVs. Let’s come back to this one and look at the technology side of the future.

No more Bookstores and Books become Video Games

TechCrunch had a fun little prophetic post called “The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline.”

“Dystopian”, for shock value; this is just a pessimistic timeline. Instead of quoting, I’ll sum up: “Things will happen, bookstores will close, B&N and Amazon rule the publishing world.” I could try to come up with a real dystopian timeline, but I might be even more cynical and expect everyone to stop reading words in any form. In other words, Fahrenheit 451: books are banned and your living room walls are giant TVs that “interact” with you.

Kristina Bjoran asks the question, “Is It Time to Rethink E-Books?” There are noble aspirations in this post; we’re all going to have to evolve and stuff like that.

As a developer-by-day, the heading “Programming Languages Must Evolve” got my attention.

He [Nick Montfort of MIT] proposes that programming languages must evolve before e-books move beyond simply simulating the traditional paper reading experience.

Most importantly, Montfort discusses and stresses the storage and processing capacity of computers (and e-books) and how they can transform the idea of what we call a book, a story, a poem, and so on.

I hate to be That Guy, but … huh? I’m sorry, but this quote feels a little like someone saying paint-brush manufacturers have to develop a new kind of paint-brush before paintings can be taken to the next level. If writers want their art form to evolve, they can’t sit around waiting for technology to define new boundaries of that art form.

(And just for the record, there are plenty of examples of how the idea of a story has been transformed already; most obviously as TV and film.)

So what else is in store for e-books? Bjoran goes on to discuss multimedia content (DVD extras for books), cinematic e-books (for example, sound effects and stuff … in case your imagination is letting you down, I guess), and of course, interactive and “immersive” e-books.

I thought reading a good story was already pretty damned immersive, and it pains me to see the suggestions that we have to make fiction more interactive in order to engage readers in the future. The article uses the example of “The Elements”, which is an app, although I’ve seen folks whip it out as an example of the future of e-books plenty of times before. Interactivity is a great learning tool – but then again, the periodic table isn’t fiction isn’t it? There’s no story to be immersed in with this example. It’s not a book; it’s an app. It’s not fiction; it’s a reference.

After all, past a certain threshold of interactive features, you no longer have a book. You have a video game.

You’re damned right you do. And we already have stories embodied in video games. Welcome to the future. So why do we have to alter the medium of text-based fiction exactly?

Speaking of new technology, the Kindle Fire hit the streets last week. Let’s hear from Eoin Purcell on “Why The Kindle Fire Worries Me”. What scares Purcell is more of this idea that Amazon doesn’t really want to sell books – they want to sell movies and music and everything else. Basically, Amazon’s newest technology is another tablet like the iPad and it favors other media over plaintext. An interesting fear; we can pretty easily surmise that Amazon made the Kindle Fire to (a) save face after getting shown up by that darned Nook Color and (b) to enter the tablet market and compete with the likes of the iPad.

But my favorite comment to the post is this one from Ron Martinez:

I’d say pure text-based fiction and non-fiction may be safest. They deliver deep experience through the immersive abstraction inherent in the word. It’s all other forms—illustrated, media-rich books of every stripe—that will bear the burden of comparison to native apps and moving media. These are the books that may easily find themselves in a new uncanny valley, if they fail to broaden their design palettes.”

Yes, thank you, Ron! You can hammer it into a rock, scratch it in graphite against a page, bang it out on a typewriter, or tap it into a computer and store it as a bunch of 1s and 0s. A good story can be engaging as it has been for all of history. You have music, plays, films, TV, video games, and so on and so forth and even though those other forms of story have value, somehow the simple plaintext written word still finds readers.

A Few Predictions I Haven’t Seen Yet

And now yours truly will dust off the ol’ crystal ball…

Ads in books

With the black and white e-ink readers, any web-browsing experience is – well, it’s painful, to say the least. But as tablets are used as e-readers more and more, there’s going to be motivation for publishers to stick clickable ads into books. Already, Kindles come with ads displayed on the screensaver, and it’s just a matter of time before ads infect your reading material. It will start out as just some ads on the “back page”, saying things like “hey, if you enjoyed that read, try this…” and then it will turn into periodic ads, maybe once per chapter or something obnoxious like that. Interactivity, indeed.

Flexing price structures

Welcome to the digital, Mr. Book. supply and demand is different now. You don’t cut prices when your warehouse is full, because it’s always full. Supply is infinite. I could see a scenario where the price of a book starts low and slowly increases as sales (and positive reviews) increase. Motivation for customers to buy early for a “discount” and later, as a book proves itself, the value goes up.

Author alliances

Here’s something I look forward to: have you ever seen the little books that have one story in the first half and then you can flip it over and start from the “back” and read another story? You see this in comic books once in a while, and even in fiction (though very rarely). Anyway, I’d love to see a situation where authors partner and package their books together in one file. It’s a huge risk to pair two books into one when you’re printing thousands of paper copies, but the few extra kilobytes it takes to add another novel to an e-book file is nothing.

Scenario: you have an e-book you want to sell for $3; you know another author who has a book in a similar genre they want to sell for $3; combine the e-books into one file, sell it for $4.50, split the revenue, $2.25 each. If you were going to sell 100 by yourself, you’d have made $300. If between you and your partner, you only sell a total of 134, you pocket $301.50. Meanwhile, the reader gets two books at once, both at a 25% discount.

The Tricky Part – this idea doesn’t work if you also sell the e-book individually at $3; both authors have to commit to the double-book and promote only that version. And of course, my scenario doesn’t take into account fees related to distribution, but these could be split evenly (and fees are there whether you’re selling a double-book or not).

Browser/OS recognition of EPUB format

Part of the reason that devices (e.g. the Kindle) and proprietary software (e.g. iTunes) have a fairly firm grip on the e-book market is because many people don’t know what to do with an e-book file. More accurately, their computer doesn’t know what to do with it, at least until the appropriate software is installed. Let me tell you a secret about the EPUB format: it’s just HTML wrapped up in a zip archive. What am I getting at here? Just that someday, e-books will be a lot easier to open and manage; much like any device with a headphone jack knows what to do with an mp3 file, any device with a screen will know what to do with an EPUB file.

And that brings me to the last one…

Authors sell direct to Readers

As Dean Wesley Smith points out in his post “Why Would You Not Spend the Time to Learn Indie Publishing?”, there is a pretty small technical barrier to getting your Word document converted into EPUB (for any e-reader except the Kindle) and MOBI (for the Kindle) formats. He outlines the steps needed to convert your files using Smashwords; however, some day your average word processor could just output to standard e-book formats, without relying on any external service. That’s one barrier down – the other two barriers are distribution and taking in the money. Distribution is easy because e-book files can be hosted anywhere; if you have a blog, you have a place to host e-book files. Many merchant services are set up to sell downloads already; PayPal, for instance, has several options for selling digital goods.

So what does this mean? The author can collect nearly 100% of the revenue if they sell books right out of their own site. Sure, I understand the value in having your book show up at Amazon, but I look around at the self-publishing authors out there right now, and I see how hard they work to get their books out by word-of-mouth. Do you think they get more sales from random Amazon customers, or do they get more sales from word-of-mouth? For all the articles and workshops I’ve seen this year about the importance of building your author platform, I’m guessing word-of-mouth is going to win out.

So I won’t fear the Amazonian overloads. They’re hear to make digital reading popular, but in the long run, it’s the author who is in the driver’s seat from here on out – but only if they want to be.

Read on for Part 2: Indigo Editing Workshops, Mini Sledgehammer Contests, and a note about the Willamette Writers Conference.

Indigo Editing Workshops
July and August, 2011
Once a month, Indigo Editing offers a double-session workshop. I’ve attended the July and August sessions so far and I have to say, I loved them. In July, Susan DeFreitas taught us about the world of magical realism – or as she prefers, fabulism – and how it differs from science fiction, fantasy, and the like. We did a few exercises, and I found those particularly valuable (especially since I kind of missed the point of one of them at first; sometimes we learn more by screwing up). In the second half of the workshop, Kristin Thiel (@KristinWithPen) ran a session that “busted some myths” of the publishing world. Thanks to both Kristin and Susan for letting me pepper you with questions during that session!

In August, Indigo’s workshop started again with Susan, this time with a lesson on honing the first page of your manuscript so that it hooks readers (/agents/editors/etc) right off the bat. We took some examples from a few different successful books and talked about what the author did exactly to hook us, and then we each read off a first page from our own work and had a discussion on what worked and what we were missing. It was extremely valuable, and I know I’ll be carrying the lessons I learned from that discussion with me whenever I refine the first page of a story. In the second session, Cory Huff (www.theabundantartist.com) taught us a few things about getting connected with our fans using our web presence. This was a great session that I walked away from with a clear “to do” list.

Mini-Sledgehammer contests
The Sledgehammer writing contest is coming up soon, and in preparation, there are a couple of “Mini Sledges” that happen every month in NE Portland and North Portland. The Sledgehammer is an over-the-weekend contest with writing prompts and a 36-hour time limit, so naturally the mini-sledges are a single night with a few prompts and a 36-minute time limit. The Blackbird Wine Shop  hosts Mini Sledge once a month, and that’s about a five minute bike ride from my house, so I have little excuse to miss it. Of course, I’ve only been to one so far, but I plan on making the next one – and of course, the main event in September!

Willamette Writers Conference
August 2011
As badly as I wanted to go, I wasn’t able to make WWCon this year. I tried to pay attention to some of the tweets around the conference, and I soon realized that Porter Anderson (Porter Anderson Media, @PorterAnderson) was tweeting some extremely comprehensive coverage. Trying to read these tweets retroactively is no easy feat using Twitter’s web search interface, but of course, Twitter has a stellar API and since I’m a web developer by day, I whipped off a script to scrape all of Porter’s tweets into one web page, sorted by categories: Tweet Coverage of WWCon11.

A New Writing Group!
One of the great benefits of attending writing conferences and workshops is networking with other writers, of course. At the July Indigo Editing workshop, I exchanged information with a couple of other writers and on Sunday our newborn writing group met for the first time at a coffee shop in downtown Portland. We didn’t get much writing in today, but we got an extreme amount of writing talk out into the open and we even came up with a couple of homework assignments. I’m really looking forward to bouncing my work off some other writers (and providing feedback to them as well), and having some accountability is always a good thing.

Read on for Part 1: Write to Publish (Ooligan Press at PSU) and Open Source Bridge…

Write to Publish (Ooligan Press)
May 21-22, 2011
Write to Publish is a two day conference that aims to “demystify the publishing process for writers”, put on by the folks at Portland State’s student-run publishing house, Ooligan Press. I attended W2P last year and found it to be extremely informative, so I had to make it again this year. They do one day of workshops and one day of open house, with readings and talks by authors, editors, agents, and so on.

Reading "Closing Loops" at W2P

This year I entered the flash fiction contest at W2P and won first prize, and I got to read my piece before the “new authors” panel came on stage. You can read my story, “Closing Loops”, here on the W2P site.

W2P 2011 also featured a special offer where an author could submit fifty pages of their novel for developmental editing by graduate student editors for fifty bucks. I had just (as in the week before) finished my first draft of the novel I’m currently working on, and so I took a shot at going through the developmental editing process. Unfortunately, it was just a bit premature for me because it really was just a first draft and I hadn’t even looked over those first fifty pages that I sent in to the editors.

Nonetheless, it was a fantastic experience. The grad student editors wrote up a great summary that included their interpretations of the characters and the plot and revealed any potential problems. I got to sit down with one of them and talk some things through. She explained that what we were doing was really more of a “global edit” rather than a “developmental edit”, mainly because it was such an early draft. It was well worth the $50 – I learned a lot and developed a plan for what to do next with the manuscript.

Open Source Bridge
June 26-29, 2011
OSB is “a conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way.” My day job is web development and system administration, and I’m a big fan of open source software and the open source philosophy. This year, I was able to combine my love of writing and my love for open source by presenting a talk about the EPUB ebook file format at this conference.

You can check out my session info  and the materials and samples  I used for the talk. It’s definitely geared toward developers, but if you’re interested in the guts of the EPUB format it might be worth a look.

That’s it for today, but in a couple of days I’ll post Part 2 and talk about the rest of my summer, including workshops by Indigo Editing, the Willamette Writers Conference, and the upcoming Sledgehammer writing contest.

When I try to get a little selfish and think come on, let’s get a greedy – there has to be something I really want – the first thing that comes to mind is “more free time”. When I think “free time”, I don’t mean “leisure time”. Sure, more leisure time would be nice, but what I really want is more time to work on more stuff.

I have a pretty low-key job, at least relative to the average job in America. I put in my forty hours a week and don’t often put in hours on the weekend or in the evenings. I travel a small amount, but otherwise I do most of my work from home. So no, I don’t feel like I’m working myself to death. I’m hobbying myself to death.

One of the roles in my day job is that of a web developer. I’m a DIY learner, and I spend a fair amount of my free time doing web development for myself, working on pet projects that are not quite appropriate for work, yet expand my knowledge and skill-set. I also do a lot of gardening – it’s something constructive and creative that my wife and I can work together on and be proud of, so we spend a lot of time planning, prepping, planting, tending, harvesting, and even preserving. I enjoy cooking and cycling – both of these things I wish I had more time to do, and they’re often the first to suffer cuts when I’m low on free time.

And then, of course, there’s writing. Writing time also faces cuts whenever free time gets slim, and it continue to do so as long as it remains a hobby. I’d like to set some goals and develop some schedule for my writing time; to push it to that level just beyond  “entertainment” or “hobby” – or even “side project”. I also know that I were to push writing all the way to “job” or “making a living”, I would grow to hate it. So it is what it is: a hobby, a side project, but with real goals.

It’s been a pretty long week. Once, a few years ago, I got into my head that I might dip my toe into the waters of freelance web development and see how I liked making a little better money. I cut my day-job down to four days a week and put in lots of nights and weekends to develop a rather complex website for a small business here in Portland. Although I don’t do much work on the site any more – just a few tweaks now and then – I often get the first call if the site goes down for any reason. I got such a call Monday morning.

What followed was the worst kind of disaster for a website – hard drive failure, lack of data redundancy, and outdated backups. I scrambled late into the night to help the business get set back up with something remotely workable while they sent the drive out for recovery, not knowing how much it would cost or what the chances of success would be.

Later in the week, my fellow IT guy at my day job installed an extra hard drive into our file server, following my instructions. Things went awry – not quite a disaster, but an unforeseen problem nonetheless, requiring us both to shed a little off-hour free time to track down the point at which things went wrong and to safely undo what we’d done.

There are days when I love my job. Most days, in fact. I love technology – when it’s used well. And a lot of what I do is guiding and advising people in how to best use technology. But when technology fails, it can suck free time – and energy – like a sieve. Every time I have to reboot a computer, I can feel myself aging while I sit there helplessly waiting. Every time I see an inexplicable error code, I want to reach past the shiny user interface, into the code, and all the way back to its creator and strangle the programmer who is making me Google random letters and numbers.

I haven’t written in a week. In the past, I used to be able to procrastinate much more easily. Lately, whenever I’m not writing for multiple days in a row, I start to feel at a loss.

In the preface to his collection of essays, “Zen in the Art of Writing”, Ray Bradbury says:

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic.

It feels good to be addicted to something worthwhile again*. To be addicted to a creative process. But like all addictions, suffering withdrawal is a bitch. Everyday life is like the rehab that keeps me from enjoying the addiction of writing. Because unlike other addictions, a creative addiction takes time and energy.

So that’s my birthday wish: more time and energy for all my hobbies and side projects, and in particular for writing. If I can get some of that, I promise not to complain about my age to my friends and family. Like I’m the only human who is aging, right?

The great thing about this wish is that I know I have the power to bring it into existence. I know I can “make time”; actually no, that’s not true. I can’t “make time”. When work calls, I have to answer, and when I run out of steam, I have to rest. What I can do is get back up faster when I’m knocked down. Instead of wallowing in the loss, grieving for my dead and buried free time, I can snap out of it, take my needed rest and then get back on the god damned horse.

And I know there are others out there in the same boat (I’m married to one). We work, we heap on the side projects, and sometimes we want to just give up – but we know that if we stick it out, we might actually accomplish something. We might actually see something to completion. And when that happens, it’s like giving yourself the best birthday wish you can imagine.

_{* I say “again”, because I once had an addiction to playing music. I put a lot of pressure on music, making it the centerpiece of my life. When you build something up so high and then it falls, it’s very hard to rebuild, and sadly, for me playing music has been downgraded from “lifelong passion” to “neglected hobby”. There is occasionally hope and inspiration in that department, and one day I’ll do it purely for the love of it – and I look forward to it being upgraded to just “hobby”.}