In Media Res

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res)

A narrative work beginning in medias res (Classical Latin: [ɪn ˈmɛdɪ.aːs ˈreːs], lit. “into the middle of things”) opens in the midst of the plot (cf. ab ovo, ab initio).[1] Often, exposition is bypassed and filled in gradually, through dialogue, flashbacks or description of past events. For example, Hamlet begins after the death of Hamlet’s father. Characters make reference to King Hamlet’s death without the plot’s first establishment of said fact. Since the play is about Hamlet and the revenge more so than the motivation, Shakespeare uses in medias res to bypass superfluous exposition.

“…bypass superfluous exposition.”

I finally figured out why so much classical fantasy bores me to tears. They start by expositing. All over the scenery. Several chapters of it. Huge, globby paragraphs that seem to go on forever and ever and ever. Until I forget why I picked up the book in the first place.

As some of you have noted, I tend to start stories kind of in the middle. That’s an outcome of using Lester Dent and the 7-point-plot-structure. A Character, in a Setting, with a Problem.

Generally, you want your first five hundred words to be Setting, which is not description of what the character sees, but their emotional response thereof. Maybe one sentence of plot or foreshadowing, then you dive headlong into story.

This is different from Pulse Pounders, which frequently begin with a gunshot or a bomb exploding or something that starts a mad dash car chase immediately, with everyone only slowing down a few chapters later after the immediate crisis has passed.

I want to hook you. Pull you in. Make you see the world and start engaging in it. Many classical works (I pick on fantasy because it has been bad about this historically from Tolkien and others) think that you first need several chapters of the main character being perfectly ordinary in their perfectly dull home, doing utterly mundane things. At least until a chorus of singing dwarves breaks in. If you were still awake to hear the opening notes.

In media res assumes that you can just start telling the story, and then go back later and fill in “what happened before.” In many ways, this is telling instead of showing, but it also picks up the pace because the main character and their problem are in motion, and they have to talk to other people about what the hell is going on. Or to figure it out at all.

Think of a Corellian Blockade Runner coming into view, pursued a few moments later by an Imperial Star Destroyer. We’re in the action. We immediately know somebody is running and somebody is chasing. We have a promise of space opera action on a grand scale. Two droids argue about whose fault it is as they Laurel and Hardy their way around, exiting stage left pursued by a bear.

Does your opening chapter serve any useful purpose as far as your plot itself goes? Or is it an information dump of all the neat things you thought up in the process of doing your worldbuilding? Would all the information speed up your story if you used micro-setting to insert a clause here or a sentence there instead, as the hero runs?

Got to talking with Renaissance Babe™ today during the Wednesday Mastermind and had to explain to her that I had an entire novel’s worth of material that happens prior to the beginning of the story I was coming up with, just because the two main characters were not “born on page one” as the old saying goes. Stuff will start in the middle of a problem, caused by a whole slew of other problems and try/fail cycles that happened off-stage years ago, the outcomes of which are only now starting to come to roost.

You’ll be emotionally engaged in these two characters before you really understand just how messy things were that they even ended up meeting.

It changes the emotional signature of the entire story this way. In a bad case of (semi-)mistaken identity, she breaks him out of jail, thinking that he’s someone else. (Technically, she’s both right and wrong, which is even better.) She wants him because he owes her money, him having stolen her share earlier.

Except it wasn’t him. That comes up pretty quickly, but the how and the when make it fun to explore. Because we started in the middle, rather than having an entire novel where the main character turns out to be a real prick to everyone around him. He gets to be the villain in this novel because all of the chickens eventually come home to roost, in one of the weirdest ways I’ve thought of yet.

Action. That’s one of my signatures. Much less talking heads, and even then, talking to a point or a purpose, usually followed by moving.

I’m not writing a literary piece about how dysfunctional my family was. (And bubba, it was pretty nasty, for nobody ending up in prison.) I’m trying to entertain you. That means grabbing the reader by the lapels on page one and dragging them (as Dean instructs us) to the bottom of the lake and holding them there. You are in the moment, being pulled along as the story unfolds before you ever have a chance to stop and admire the wholesome banality of the shire.

If I did that, you might put the book down and walk away. Instead, you have to read just one more chapter, as my brother-in-law complains about when he tries to keep useful bedtimes.

Start in motion. Stay in motion. Bypass superfluous exposition for micro-setting detail that adds tastes and textures without ever slowing the action.

(She also accuses me of using food descriptions and fashion porn to great offensive use, but that’s grounding the reader, because a good biscuits and gravy with chicken fried steak means your stomach rumbles while you read, if I’ve done my job.)

Character, Setting, Problem. In media res, rather than spending chapters explaining your world and how some prince or magic sword was lost and how an oracle rose to prophesy the coming chosen one child. Screw that. Gimme the old fart wizard grabbing the kid by the arm as he walks out of the bar with a gruff “hey, we need to go save the world.” line to start things with a bang. (Seriously, I’d eat that shit like candy.)

Readers like a mystery, if you dangle it just right in front of them. Draw them in. Entice them.

Drag their silly asses to the bottom of the lake before they know what happened.

You do that by starting in the middle of something much bigger.

My official job title with Knotted Road Press, Inc. is Marketing Troll. (Seriously. Says so in the incorporation papers. She’s the boss. I just work here.)

Part of that is to address marketing issues in addition to my usual stuff. That means trying things to see if they will help build sales and revenue, which has been kinda a pain in the ass as COVID has worked so hard to shut things down, ruin lives, and depress the hell out of people.

Last year, some folks saw a tremendous spike in revenue from their catalog, because folks were staying home and needed something to entertain themselves after they finished the BBEG at the end of Netflix. So they read.

But it was not a universal thing. Some authors saw explosion. Some saw nothing. A great many sputtered and guttered, losing whatever traction that they might have had previously.

I have theories, but without undertaking a massive double-blind statistical analysis designed to test, I cannot prove anything. And that level of work is not going to happen. I do, however, assume Amazon has done all the math. (If any of you have connections, I grok t-sql at a rather high level and would love to ask a few questions and watch them nod knowingly without ever divulging anything. Just to know.)

My sales went down a bit initially, then slowly recovered. Not great. Not bad. The first thing we had done back in the winter of 2020 (Feb-Mar) was to cut out all major expenses from the budget. At the time, that was audio books and translations into German. (We got lucky, in that the US Small Business Administration offered us a loan at ridiculous rates, so we were able to afford two more Science Officer novellas into German at around $8k US total, and take years paying it back. Worth it, as they paid off and continue to earn us money and fans.)

Going forward, one of the things was to keep expenses low, by approaching everything with a strict eye to cost/benefit. April 2020, my Amazon Advertising expense literally exploded, as Amazon started showing things to everyone. At the same time, nobody was buying (I think they all went into KU and stayed there) so my costs weren’t balanced. I ended up shutting down almost everything and dialing back everything else for about 4-5 months.

Kindle Unlimited (KU) lets folks read anything they want in the KU catalog for a fixed, monthly subscription price. Lovely for the reader, but not for someone trying to break in as a writer. It is a treadmill that forces more and more books out of you every month for a declining income because the monthly share-out money is not growing all that fast, in comparison to new books being cataloged in. Put it this way, in the way back, Traditional Publishing probably published less than 50,000 books per year. Amazon usually sees at least 1,000,000 new titles per year, and I suspect that has gone up over the last five years. At some point, it will be two million.

Outside of Amazon, none of the other ebook retailers (Kobo, Apple, Barnes&Noble, etc.) really offer any sort of useful advertising tools. As a result, you have to head over to third party options, such as Facebook ads or one of the daily newsletter blasts (Bookbub is the biggest currently, AFAIK).

This is where it gets interesting. If I asked ten people if any one of those tools had worked for them, I’d get twenty-seven answers. Some people say FB is the greatest ever. Others have seen absolutely no movement on the dial from expensive programs. Even folks that do extensive and invasive A/B testing, over and over again, aren’t seeing reliable results. Doesn’t have to be great, but needs to be reliable for that kind of money.

Part of that comes down to the fact that books are not widgets. Every book is a completely unique thing, and readers have variable tastes. Some might want cookies today. Some scones. Some decaf soy mochas. As a writer, it helps if you have a wide bakery of literary options when someone walks in the door, but that is not a guarantee of success.

This year, I slowly dialed my Amazon advertising back up to where it had been. I twiddle with it regularly, trying to fine tune my expenses by dialing down things with a bad return and dialing up things not getting seen. Right now, I’m spending about $400/month there, which is more than I like, and more than I used to, but sales have slowly returned and keep moving better.

I take the organic approach, which is the point of this blog. There are programs where you can participate in some giveaway where everyone who signs up agrees to get your newsletter, in return for the chance to win an ebook reader filled with books by every author participating. Second place is just the ebooks. Third place is a set of steak knives or something.

I’ve tried a few of those. And seen a massive unsubscribe rate every time I send folks out that first “Welcome” email following on. They don’t want to hear from random author, even though they agreed to.

So I don’t do those anymore. Not until I get a better deal and less headache.

This last summer, a particular website reached out to me blind and asked if I wanted to by an advertising spot on their main page. Science fiction centered. Probably my audience. But then I dug in and noted that I was being asked to spend hundreds of dollars for my tiny ad to be buried in with a ton of others, all the same size. No way to stand out. High cost. Low expected benefit.

After some back and forth, I realized that they were a little desperate for advertisers, thus an aggressive discounting, but their main page still had empty spots. Middlemen, who had a model that wasn’t working. Or no longer working is more likely. The world has changed as a result of the COVID lockdowns.

Didn’t do business with them, but a week later somebody else reached out. They were discounting $29 to $19, and also discounting their Author of the Day deal. I ended up doing it, spending I think $63 to get placement on their daily SF newsletter. Low cost, so something I was willing to experiment with.

The Science Officer (book one of Javier) was the deal. Sales of the book on Amazon doubled for about two weeks, which wasn’t much. But I also saw the series spike pretty solidly as well, which means money. The ad campaign paid for itself that way within one month.

Interestingly, I saw newsletter signups explode. As I said, I’ve taken the organic approach to building my list. Getting fans, rather than random pedestrians off the street.

I used to forward my blog to Facebook, but they kept breaking the link at their end, so I just cut it. Still feed places like Amazon, Goodreads, etc., so I get people signed up coming from there. But this particular daily deal caused a wonderful (and sustained) uptick in readers.

I send the Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter on the first of the month, with the publishing news coming on the 15^th. Every time I send Redneck, I see a few unsubscribes, because folks aren’t really interested in me as a brand, but I have more net signups, so I have been growing slowly over the years.

In August, Anti-Stodgy went to 833 recipients. That was the Before. September went to 899. I just sent October to 1,041. I actually had to upgrade my mailerlite account finally, because I had moved into the second category, and have to pay for the account (about ten bucks a month, which is a nice deal, all things considered).

I know folks with twenty or fifty thousand subscribers. Some of them make stupid big money. Some aren’t. I make an above-average, middle-class living as a writer. Less than I did as a Database Architect in Seattle in the before time, but my goal is to keep building that to the point that I exceed that income, without any of the stress and crazy shit I had to put up with in those days.

The Organic Approach means that I’m taking my time. I can do that, because I got lucky in places, and planned in others. (“Assume Success, plan for Victory” instead of assuming failure and trying to mitigate it as well as you can.)

My newsletter folks will wash out some that aren’t that interested in my brand of entertainment, but that’s fine, because those folks who remain with me are the ones that want to buy my books. To keep me in a lifestyle to which I could become accustomed. Trust me, not putting on pants is its own special kind of victory.

I’m building fans. Some of them have even turned into friends, to the extent that I invite them to the house for dinner whenever they are in town. Sometimes, they come to Seattle specifically to visit. It is an amazing thing.

My process won’t work for everyone. Some folks preach a prosperity gospel of things you MUST do in order to succeed. I ignore most of them, because I know one of their secrets. Most of them are trying to make as much money as they can today, because they have a gimmick and it will fail soon and leave them with nothing.

I go back and look at the folks preaching some trick five or ten years ago, and they are all gone now. New folks with new theories have replaced them. For now. Every gimmick fails eventually. I have a different goal.

I want a career that is still going strong thirty years from now when I’m in my eighties. My plan is to have an entire stack of novels done, edited, covered, and ready to be published when I die, so my great^whatever heirs can keep making money off my estate for a long time. I’d like to live to see 2060. (Technically, 2070, if I can swing it.) If I died in 2060, my books would remain in copyright until 2135 CE. And I’ll have a LOT of books by then. Just started novel #73 yesterday. Writing 12-18 novels per year right now. Gonna have a party when I hit 100. Probably early 2023, so mark your calendars.

Organic. Solid, because you get the authentic me, rather than some character that a marketing survey had decided would be most advantageous this month. You get the highs and the lows. You get the Anti-Stodgy campaign and the Redneck Chef. You get the sticking it to the man and the politics of social and cultural revolution. Because that’s me.

I have (hopefully) built up a cadre of folks that find that sort of thing interesting and fun, and will continue to support my by buying books. I even had a special, inner crowd of folks that support me monthly on Patreon (https://patreon.com/blazeward) and get to see stuff long before it ever makes it into print. And I have a lot of short fiction that I have written especially for them, just so I have a new story or series to share with them every month.

Organic, because not forced. Slow, because not flash in the pan. Careful and deliberate, because I want folks coming back time and again to see what’s new.

How are you building your career?

The topic of world-building and series building is a bit near and dear to my heart today, mostly for all the wrong reasons.

I build a lot of universes for my science fiction. I try to keep the independent, and in doing so play with the technological advances, culture, etc, so that each isn’t just a thinly-veiled copy of the previous one. Filing the serial numbers off, we call it.

Not every idea is going to turn into an six-novel series, though. I can only write so many words in any given year, and so I approach the topic of novels with care. In the meantime, I tend to write chained short fiction. This lets me jump in on a topic and just sort of work out a lot of details on the fly as I want to write story number one.

And I always assume that a new story is going to be part of something bigger, at least in the planning stage.

That means details, notes, lots of brain-dumping into a doc file. Character names, descriptions, etc. Everything that was important enough to include gets saved for later, just so I am consistent.

But I had a problem this month.

A couple of years ago, I started two new worlds, mostly to let me go into side topics to keep my Patreon folks entertained by letting them read things well before anyone else got a chance. One of those turned into Yasmin of the Desert.

The other was Ollie.

Running joke around here. I needed to create an administrative assistant who could answer certain emails without necessarily letting the person on the other end of the line know that they were talking to me. Sometimes, you want to present big enough that you have PEOPLE.

So I created the character of Oleg Chilikov. Oleg is derived from the Old Norse name Helgi, derived from heilagr meaning “holy, blessed”. Chilikov comes from Bulgarian/Turkish and means “steel.”

Seriously, Holy Sword is how it can be rendered into modern English, and too good to pass up.

I even introduced him as a character in the Jessica Keller Chronicles, but he only has bit parts and then vanishes again. (And I’d have to stop and look to remember which book. Goddess of War, I think, but don’t quote me. I’ve written a few since then.)

Then one day, I had a weird idea for a Xenoarchaeologist in a deep-space setting. And decided to let Ollie star in it. (He actually has an email at KRP, for those of you who know.)

To be extra mean, I named his ship Boundary Shock. Heh.

So I wrote the first few stories. All was well. Silly adventures in space, intended to be part of a long, serialized story, like I like to do.

Except that something went wrong. As the story unfolded, it started getting too serious for the initial tone I had set out in the first couple of stories. And it was getting worse as we progressed.

So I finished five of them and was about 8800 words into #6 when I literally put the whole thing away for better than two years. Didn’t help that a soft apocalypse hit in there, further throwing me off and I didn’t want to go into that dark place that Ollie and Rufus threatened to take me.

I can’t write dark when I’m happy. And I can’t write happy when I’m dark. Not believably, anyway.

So I put Ollie away.

Fast forward to late summer 2021.

There is a call for SF stories with an intended title of something along the lines of Have spaceship, will travel. A riff on the old television western, for certain fans.

At the same time, I have a Boundary Shock Quarterly deadline coming up in January for the theme of Veterans. What does a soldier do after the war?

Writer brain looks at that and says two-birds-one-stone. We’ll create a new universe and tell two stories. All well and good.

Except that story #1 turned out to be MUCH darker than I had anticipated. Strong story. Great characters. Great conflict, because I have a strong hero and an equally rugged villain. (Your hero and your story are only as good as the villain. Keep that in mind.)

So story #1 works great for Boundary Shock Quarterly. That will be Roland who you will meet in Issue 018 in the Spring of 2022. But I don’t think that the other editor wants me to go dark. They have said to keep military SF to a dead minimum, but I know writers. They’ll try to shave those corners anyway. Grimdark. Hard-ass. The works. I will stand out by being a little sillier.

So I looked around for what I could do in the meantime.

Writer-brain suggests that Ollie might work for the anthology call. He might. Not sure yet. Got folks looking at that story. If it works, great.

At the same time, I was done with projects for now, and looking for what to write next. So I reread all of the Ollie stuff to see. I had expected to have to redraft everything, and I might, except that I managed to reel myself in just before going utterly dark. Or rather, I left myself at a place where I could dive into dark, but then shift back out and explore the lighter tones.

Serious topics do not always have to be grimdark, people. Sometimes you need a drop-koala sidekick who gets drunk on Human chocolate. That’s Rufus. And a xenoarchaeologist who prefers cargo shorts, photographer vest, and only wears shirts or pants when it gets close to freezing. Ollie’s a little weird, but lots of fun.

So I hit the end of where I’d left #6 and writer-brain kicked me in the shins. At that point I started filling it in.

Forty-thousand words later, and I have finished the first long arc of story. But I have a problem. 1-5 are individual short stories. Self-contained. Split in time and space from each other, in order to let me bounce across the top of the longer story instead of everyone walking to Mordor.

Those five come in at about 29,000 words. Plus #6 which is now 51k at finished draft.

Normally, I write long novel arcs. Or self-contained short story arcs. Pizzafarmer, who you will meet at some point. Flight Officer Brannon. Yasmin is out and I will probably write Vol 3 as a full novel, instead of the shorter pieces that made up Vol 2.

I asked one of my First Readers to just blast through all 80k of rough material, not to correct anything (though he will) but to tell me if I have a novella and a novel, or a longer novel on my hands. I know where the story goes next. Writer-brain has been sitting on all that for two years without bothering to let me know.

If I had a Traditional Publishing career, I’d be in the process of functionally redrafting everything from scratch to turn the whole into a single manuscript, without the odd pauses at the front. Because I am Indie, I have the option to do it my way.

So do you.

Read that again.

You can put out anything that your readers/fans will buy. People, I’ve published a novel written entirely in poetic form. The Forestal. And people buy it. (It is really weird when someone in Japan buys a copy, which has happened more than once. Thank you, Japanese fans!)

I can put out the first five as short stories for $0.99 each if I wanted. I can gather them all up as a novella (probably $2.99 at that point. Maybe $3.99.) Or I can do a little cleanup and just have five shorter pieces at the front and a full novel at the back, all under one title and spine, and send it out for $5.99 like I normally do.

Personally, I’m hoping that the anthology takes #1, at which point I will drop #1 wide when I get the rights back, and probably just drop everything as a single book. Already planning what the ‘next’ novel is. And the one after that.

Seriously, when you have that much world-building done, it flows pretty well.

This is the freedom that comes with Indie. I don’t have to deal with an agent telling me that she can’t sell something until I completely rewrite it to a form that a traditional-style publisher knows what to do with. I am my own best agent that way.

You are your own best agent. Stop listening to folks telling you that you have to do something a particular way, unless they will be paying you.

Heinlein’s Rules #3.

If they will pay you, they can ask. That DOES NOT mean you have to do it, just that they are probably offering you money if you do. The editor gets to ask, because they have the checkbook. Some deadbeat in a coffeeshop better have a successful, CURRENT career as a writer before they are allowed to tell you something is wrong. (Don’t listen to someone who published their last TradPub book before 2010. The world they lived in is long gone and will never come back.)

So write the story as it demands to be written. You have fans of your writing who will buy it. (However many, even if it is just your Mom and a cousin. That’s money. Keep at it.)

I can be a little experimental because I have fans who expect me to color outside the lines occasionally. I’ll still bring the popcorn and space battles at other times, but I’m going to give them a fun, running start at something, so they will be entertained.

Build it the way you see fit. Call it good. Publish it.

Do not make the mistake of redrafting it fourteen times to get it right, because while it might be pretty at that point, you will have stripped out all the emotion. In here, you’ll get Ollie, Rufus, and Mani being a little silly, even as things get dark. Humor, dirty jokes, grand performances, the works.

Because I’ll bring it all back after we get to the old Imperial Capital at Baikonur. Then we’re off on a grand, merry chase, looking for signs of the ancient beings that first created the Ohran Web that connects worlds together.

And I’ll be having almost as much fun as Ollie and the gang.

So the first four Wednesdays of every month (I get a few off over a year), I have a mastermind conversation with some pro. Writing and Publishing Peers, Writing Student (who is a concert pianist, former nude model, social media small businesswoman, literature expert, and composer), or Classical Composer.

You learn a lot of things, talking to people beyond the gang at the coffee shop, unless you’ve found/built the right crowd.

Today was Writing Student (Renaissance Babe, honestly, but she doesn’t always like that title). She had just finished reading a rough draft of a new Book One (the cyberpunk stuff, written using the Heroine’s Journey as envisioned by Carriger), and had comments, questions, and things I could learn. I haven’t dug into her comments as yet, but they’ll be good, because she and I came back to it time and again over two hours today.

She’s read a number of my works now. Some of them haven’t been published yet. But things she needed to know at each stage as she learns the elements she needs to conquer Indie Publishing.

One of her comments today came when we were discussing themes of my work. She pointed out that I frequently return to the overarching theme of good and evil.

So I defaulted back to something Kris Rusch uses as a measure when she is reading or writing a story.

“Why this story?”

Why did you write it? Why should I read it? What is it about this that compels? Why did you pick this topic/story/idea over the others?

Why?

I’ve been evil. We don’t talk about those days much. A great many of the folks who might remember them are no longer around. A few of them died early of the sorts of roughness that such a lifestyle engenders. I got lucky and escaped.

I no longer serve evil. But there was a time…

Good and evil is a grand topic. I could write about romantic, comedic misunderstandings. Fish out of water stories. By-the-numbers mysteries.

But I write about characters. People. She has noted that I write “messy people in lived in worlds.”

They have fears. Dreams. Hobbies. Favorite foods. They were not, as the saying goes, “born on page one of a blank piece of paper.”

Frequently, you know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when someone is sticking it to the man. The man usually deserves it, because he is in service to evil. I’m about embark on a new world, where the main character is a wanted outlaw, because he was a high-ranking soldier in the (republican) Commonwealth Army, on the run after the monarchy has been Restored by a counter-revolution. He used to hunt aristocrats. Kill them because if you kill enough aristocrats, you can’t really have an aristocracy.

He was a warrior dedicated to founding and preserving an elected republic. With undoing the divine right of kings and forging a nation of laws rather than monarchical whim.

And that makes him an outlaw. Because the king’s side returned.

Who is good here? The man who wants laws, or the one who wants the divine right of kings to be above any law, anywhere?

For everyone who suggests that aristocracy it a better form of government, I suggest you go study the history of English king Charles I, executed in CE 1649. To quote Roland, my main character in describing someone drawn loosely from Charles himself: “You might never find a more mendacious, churlish, garish, and vulgar man if you spent a lifetime trying.” (I know a few other more recent politicians that might apply to, as well.)

Would you want someone above all laws deciding what your rights were? We live in a modern, democratic world, where the laws are above the leaders, not the other way around. Think about some of the politicians who have blown up their careers recently (Cuomo of New York State comes immediately to mind): Would you want to live in a place where nobody could touch a man like that? You think he’d make a great king?

That’s the problem with aristocracy having any political power anywhere. For every good one, you are likely to have hundreds of useless or aggressively vicious ones using their god-given power to run roughshod over anyone and everyone. You just have to look at human history for any example. How many kings do you know have “The Good” after their name, versus “The Terrible” or something?

But what is evil?

Roland sees it in the Divine Right of Kings. Haselrig (his foe), sees it in the chaos that allows any charismatic charlatan populist to gather together a mob and rule without restraint. (A republic, for example.)

All of us moderns want restraint. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness require that we have the personal freedom to find it. Now imagine you are tied by birth to the land upon which you were born. Subject to the whims of a lord who can do anything he wants, any time he wants. That wasn’t overthrown that long ago, either.

Sound like fun? Nobody wants to be born into the lowest rung of society, unless there are protections. Where do those protections come from?

From laws. Laws above, not below.

So I’m going to explore evil, but it is a relative concept. Roland sees it in a completely different manner from Haselrig. In their confrontations, I expect it to explore many of the same themes as Valjean and Javert did, because if you are going to steal from other writers, steal from the best.

Victor Hugo influenced RL Stevenson. I see Stevenson’s fingerprints in a television show that ran 1977-1982, starring Bill Bixby as an outlaw pursued to the ends of the earth.

Again, Valjean and Javert.

It is all a matter of perspective, when you get down to it.

But that perspective also rests on your ethics.

Who do you serve?

Had a long phone call with a friend and fellow writer yesterday. Such things tend to ramble, and that’s good. We’re both writers, so mostly we talk craft and business. And music, because she’s a musician. And other things. (The wife accuses this redneck of being a renaissance man.)

Not entirely random, but getting there.

From a literary interest standpoint, we’re just about as far apart as two people can get. She makes it a point to read all of the Hugo and Nebula nominees. Is currently in a book club where that’s what they do. I honestly couldn’t tell you any such titles except when they capture the cultural zeitgeist and end up redefining some genre.

For example, William Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk (and he’ll point you at the folks who did). JK Rowling didn’t invent Magic Academies. However, both of them pretty must established those two genres for everyone else coming along.

At the same time, one of the reasons I don’t follow those things is that I’ve seen the sausage being made. Hugos in the past were awarded as a result of about 1000-1200 voters who had signed up for that year’s WorldCon. Half a decade ago, a group of fascists figured out how they could stuff the ballots and other shenanigans. It blew up in their faces spectacularly, and I’m happy.

At the same time, it just shows that such awards are popularity contests within a small cluster of self-described experts. Nothing at all to do with the quality of the books themselves.

In the broader realm of science fiction, I run into the same problem. More than once I’ve sat down and tried to read one of the “Best of XXXX Year” or “Year’s Best…” etc short story collections put out by THOSE PEOPLE. Honestly, the Silmarillion is an easier read. And usually makes more sense.

Science fiction (and maybe other genres, but I’m not sure) has had a problem in the past of wanting to explore really cool ideas. And rewarding those really cool ideas. And hardly ever once stopping to actually ask “yes, but is the story any good?”.

Many of them are a cute idea. Fun character concept. Maybe an amazing setting. Possibly a problem that needs to be addressed. Many of those “grand important literary stories” we’re supposed to be impressed by manage one of the three. But only one. Those Best Of collections are just one right after another.

As a writer, I work the seven point plot structure most of the time. Character, Setting, AND Problem. My story fails in my eyes if I miss on even one of those. Which is probably why I’ll never win one of those big awards.

I’m here to entertain you. She and I compared my stuff to some of what she was reading. Those all had socio-political statements to make. And only maybe actually tell a story. Right now, they were wading through a whole swamp of Neo-Confederate anti-colonial slave/rape/pain stories, told from the standpoint of the people being abused.

Good. Science fiction is all about the “What If?” element of story telling. Those topics should be explored, especially by folks at the short end of the stick vis-a-vis Modern American Culture. I’m about as upper-middle-class, pasty white, cis-presenting, not-currently-bearded, science fiction writer as you can get. I can talk about those kinds of characters, but I haven’t ever lived that.

I’ve never been pulled over or stopped on the sidewalk by a cop because of my color, race, gender, or anything else. And SF lets you thinly veil such things in a way that you can talk about them and explore them. And talk about normative results.

What should be, rather than what is.

However—and this is a big however—they still need to be interesting. Entertaining. She talked about plodding through them, because the writers had a fantastically detailed and interesting setting to explore. But maybe cardboard cutout archetypes chewing scenery. And the problem was the exact same one that she’d just waded through in the previous half-dozen stories.

So I offered her some of my approaches. (Masterminding, but she’s more of a young writer taking all her amazing expertise in other art-as-profession lives and turning them to the written word now than a true peer. Today. That will change.)

My wife, the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ didn’t really understand my writing style until I made her watch The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension. There is a scene were aliens have attacked. Two minor characters go down to the lab to look around. One is an old salt. The other is the new kid who is our pseudo-narrator, named New Jersey. (Just watch it if you haven’t seen it.)

New Jersey asks why is there a watermelon in an industrial press. Reno starts to explain, thinks about it for a second, waves it off. “I’ll explain later.”

And never does. For decades, that has been a thread that you can tug at and never solve. (The director had his reasons, and they make perfect sense, but it has nothing to do with the film.)

I write complex characters who are good/excellent at one thing that tends to define them at the top of book one. At the same time, they have flaws that come up later. Holes that can be exploited. Gaps where they need a friend to step in and handle things.

Valentinian is a card sharp who’s pretty good with a blaster. (Modeled loosely on Han Solo.) But over the course of the series, he realized just how much more dangerous the rest of his newly acquired crew/family is, and how he doesn’t have to be the heavy anymore. And he smiles, because Kyriaki and Dave are just deadly. Let them handle it.

Are your characters interesting? Are they the sort of person you might have over for a beer or coffee, and just chat? Or are they two-dimensional cutouts? What are their hobbies when they aren’t doing? What keeps them up at night?

In a similar vein, how different is your setting? How many other people have done the exact same thing in the last year or so. What makes yours unique? What makes it interesting?

If you haven’t gone that extra step, likely it won’t be anything more than ‘Oh, I’ve seen this story a hundred times before’ when the reader hits it. And then their eyes kind of glaze over and they maybe just skip on to the end of the story and agree that they guessed how it would turn out.

Have you made them think? Have you entertained them?

Or have you just filled a few pages with an interesting idea that maybe gets nominated for some award and forgotten after that? Those nominations can be useful, but I hate to tell you how many writers I know who turn out the pretty words and interesting concept stories, then go back to their day job at the call center or the mall.

If you haven’t impressed and entertained the reader, they won’t end your story and flip over to see what else you have written that they might buy.

The WHOLE POINT of being in anthologies with your short stories is to hook someone, so that they go buy the rest of your catalog. That is, if you want to make writing your profession. (See “Do you want to be Famous or Rich?”)

Famous writers win awards. A few get book deals. A fewer of those get movie/tv deals. Most of them make less than $10,000USD/year. And generally WAY less. Not enough to live on in this country by a country mile.

You either have a job and write in your spare time, or have a supportive spouse who pays all the bills so that you can write.

Circling back, my friend reads those award-nominated stories, but finds her ass dragging after a while. Especially when they hit the same Problem or same Setting several times in a row, none of which took the extra step to entertain.

And I can hear a few folks explaining to me that I don’t understand literature. No, I do. But my stories are entertaining first and foremost. The political, moral, and ethical questions are buried down a layer and you absorb them in the process of racing to the end of the book because you can’t put it down.

And you can’t. I’ll hook you. My craft is good enough. Because first and foremost, I want your money. After I get that cash, then I will make you think. You might not even realize it, because my characters talk about these problems, and deal with them, without my heavy-handed moralizing like a dead, lead hand on your bum, shoving you into the sausage maker.

Put simply (as noted above): Do you entertain?

Are your stories such that readers will put this anthology down when they finish your story and go look up EVERYTHING ELSE YOU’VE EVER DONE with credit card in hand?

We call that Walking the Catalog when you see book one followed by two, three, four, etc, over a course of a few days. Means I’ve hooked a new reader. I have several hundred titles that they can buy. And I put out more every month, so that they can come back time and again.

Because I entertain my readers. And challenge their legal, moral, and ethical  standpoints with my characters. You may disagree with me, but you will have to think. I’m going to challenge you, but first, I’m going to grab you by the lapels and drag your ass to the bottom of the lake and hold you there with my story.

Are you doing that to your readers?