Because there are very few people actually listening, I can pretty much talk about anything here. Those of you paying attention, feel free to offer suggestions, advice, and/or winning lottery tickets… 🙂

For any creative type, the struggle in life is always the mundane versus the exciting. There are all these stories that I would like to tell, but the day job inhibits me. It requires so much of the life and energy of many artists, to have to put food on the table and a roof overhead. Mazlow covered this.

There are some who have what we call a “supportive spouse,” which is the person who goes to work and supports the household so that we, the artist, can pursue our dreams without having to be taking orders, moving boxes, or writing code all day. Those people are worth their weight in dreams.

Some of us, however, do not have that luxury. Or, in my case, I’m the supportive spouse so that Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) can do her thing.

Eventually, my goal is to not have to get up in the morning and go to work. To get there, there is a number. I’m not sure exactly what that number is, but I know it exists.  I know the amount of money I make monthly at the day job. While it would be utterly fantastic to be able to replace that with other income streams, I’m not anywhere close right now in terms of monthly book sales. But I don’t have to be, because if I’m not buying dress shoes, not commuting to work, not being all those things, I can live much smaller and still fake sanity.

At the same time, I am selling books. (Thank you, by the way, for reading them, and telling your friends.) That is a second stream of revenue that helps me pay off the credit cards and other things that came up in 2015 as I built a house, got married, and had a few other interesting adventures. It will get me there.

Fabulous Publisher Babe and I were talking about how to achieve other revenue streams on this last Saturday with a group of like-minded weirdos that we collectively refer to as the Bellevue Writers Lunch. (Because we started out having a business lunch once a month and Bellevue was central for everyone. Saturday was in Lynnwood.) We talk writing, but more we talk about publishing, and advertising, and other stuff. How to do better covers, better blurbs. Better discoverability. We talk about how to make ourselves better as business people.

All of that translates into money. Money translates, in this particular instance, into the happiness of being able to walk away from the day job and just write and create full-time. (I am a storyteller. I have always been one. But I would love to be able to make a living at it.)

Andy brought up the topic of a Patreon. Fabulous Publisher Babe and I had been talking about her doing one, featuring, among other things, early access to her catalog of never-been-seen-before short stories, months or years before she publishes them for the rest of the world to see.

Other artists, especially other writers we know have tried this. Some of them have had some modicum of success. You almost certainly won’t make enough money from a monthly Patreon to walk away, but it becomes one more stream of nickels. And those nickels add up. Because you add them to nickels from books, and from magazine sales, and and and…

But her advantage is that she writes short stories. She has a compact object that she can share with her supporters as a reward for someone giving up a starbucks or three every month to support the arts.

But I wanna play, too.

It’s not so easy for me. I have written short stories in the past (and not so short ones), but I don’t have a ready back catalog of things to share. (Sure, I could comb through hundreds of old poems I wrote when I was a very angry young man, but I’m not sure that it would appeal to anyone enough get them to cough up money monthly for them.)

If I took the time each month to write a short story, that would also cut my productivity on the novels by about a quarter, as I can write a pretty good story in a week.

Another option Linda suggested was to serialize a novel.  Take something that is done, but has not been published yet, and put it up a few chapters at a time for my fans, so they can read it before anyone else. They would also see it in the much rougher state than the final, and could offer suggestions, corrections, and thoughts. (My novels are pretty clean when I get to the end, but that means it makes sense to me. I still rely on several First Readers to go through the text and point out all the places where something that was in my head never quite made it onto the page.)

The downside to serialization is that I tend to write pretty quickly (as you know), and then work fast on the First Read, Copy Edit, book design, and publication.  It’s not like Traditional, New York, Publishing, where I might finish a book and send it off to the editor, for it to come out on the bookshelf three or four years later. I wrote and published the following in 2015: The Mind Field, Moonshot, Queen of the Pirates, The Story Road, Last of the Immortals, and The Gilded Cage.  And I’m racing myself against the clock to finish the current novel, because I think I can finish the first draft before January 1. It won’t come out until spring, but I count the words against my annual total.

Next year, I won’t be building a house, moving into it, getting married, honeymooning, or a few other things, so I ought to be even more productive.

What weighs on my soul is what we call in business “opportunity costs.” I could write fewer novels, and more short stories, and possibly build up a Patreon base that might cut down on the number of years until I can quit working for the man. But at the same time I might just plow ahead and write as many novels as I can, hoping that they establish a sales baseline that provides me a random collection of nickels from a whole bunch of spines each month, growing as I put more product into the bakery for the casual reader wandering down the street to smell.

But I’m not alone, here. I’m surrounded by a wonderful collection of friends who help. I have fans who will even possibly read these words and weigh in with their entirely different view of things as a reader. (Thanks: K & B) I have connections on social media that might show me a radically new way to do things that I’ve never come across.

It helps me to think, when I put words on paper, even electronic ones. I don’t have any answers. But I don’t have to. I have stories. I have dreams. I have plans.

Thanks for letting to talk your ear off. I look forward to any advice you want to offer. The good ones will even get published, as I presume the rest of you can find all the male enhancement drugs and such you need on the interwebs without my help. 🙂

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Quick survey: What kind of reader are you?

There are two interesting schools of thought out there today, when it comes to how people read. On the one hand, the old school (Traditional Publishing) demands that a writer must be closely pigeon-holed into a very specific genre category. The corollary is that if you write something “different” from that category, ever, you must do so under a new pen name. Many of the more established writers I know (being folks who have been successfully traditionally published decades ago, and possibly still today) have gone through this inanity.

It gets more interesting, decades later, when they get their rights to a book back, and want to republish it as themselves, rather than as who New York demanded they be back then. Now they have to identify themselves in such a way that readers who remember them from before can find them, while letting them know that the person they think of is really just a facet of a much more complicated writer.  Kris and Dean are both veterans of these psychic wars.

At the other end of the spectrum are folks like me. We’re proudly indie. I write it, edit it, and publish it, without sending it off to an agent or submitting it to a publishing house for consideration. (It helps that I married my Publisher, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm). YMMV)

Nobody gets to tell me if something is good enough to see daylight. There are no trunk stories waiting for me to get around to. (Not counting all the poetry I wrote 1984-2004, of which, lots, but I’m getting to it over time.) And I don’t have to publish things under pseudonyms.

(And we’ll leave aside, for now, the rampant sexism that says that girls are too icky to write hard science fiction. I’ll let Judith tear your limbs off and beat you to death for suggesting that to her. She’d probably enjoy that bit.)

Will you, the reader, be willing to wander down every strange and exotic pathway my twisted and elusive muse takes me?

She can be Br’er Rabbit, some days.

It’s on my mind because I’m getting down the last bits of a new novel. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) tries to write every one of her novels with a “practice” to it. She might be working on wallpaper, or senses, or nailing every chapter with a cliff-hanger. Something new to expand her repertoire.

For those of you keeping score at home, I wrote Auberon, Queen of the Pirates, and Last of the Immortals functionally back to back to back. (With Story Road tucked in there for good measure, but related and associated.) This current project is something totally else, at least for me.

First off, it is slow. This novel is very much a coming of age, and literary. Single POV, when I just did eleven for Immortals. Everything takes place in the perception of the main character, and she’s a bit unreliable as a narrator. (Hint, possibly crazy, hard to tell.) She’s setting out to get revenge on the man who killed her best friend. Problem is, however, her friend was a costumed super-villain and the guy who killed her was a hero.

The novel is fun, and deep, and goes into strange places.

It is not gunfights and car chases. It is not a 40,000 word space battle (unlike the last section of Immortals, for example.) It is not a wild, seat of your pants ride, like some of my fans have enjoyed with the Jessica Keller novels.

I will tell you that it is the first of a trilogy arc I will have done by this time next year, Good Lord willing and creek don’t rise. If I was Traditionally Published, there is no question I would have to put it out under a pen name. I actually set out to create half a dozen when I started, because that was what everyone had to do.

Dean, however, assures me (us) that modern readers are sophisticated enough to realize that if they like a writer, they will probably like all the strange stuff, as long as they know what they’re getting into up front. That means good covers that convey the right genre. It means good, tight blurbs that entice you in. A teaser just inside the cover that communicates the essence of the Voice of the tale, rather than the spoilers or the cliff-hanger. An opening that grabs you by the lapels and sucks you right down the rabbit hole.

You know, the usual suspects.

Which means that we, as writers, no longer have to be other people.

The conversations lately have been thus: Once I finish it and send it off to the first readers (all female for specific reasons, this time) will they rate it as Publish in order, or save until all three are done and drop them back to back to back? (I will be going back to Jessica Keller IV: Goddess of War as soon as this project goes to First Readers, so don’t worry about not having your Moirrey fix.)

I won’t know until they tell me what I should do. And I’ll listen to them because this is so different from I’ve written. The closest thing might be The Story Road, but with far fewer “adult situations” as my main character describes herself as “20 and never been kissed” more than once. The sort of slow, emotional build-up. That sort of depth to the universe and details that normally pass in the background.

So: your vote. Would you like to read something totally different from Jessica soon, or later when all three are ready?

cheers,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

I didn’t get much done over the long weekend (Thanksgiving in the US). Did the traditional chili-dogs breakfast (long story, remind me to tell y’all sometime, preferably over mead), then invited some friends over and had what we call an Art Colony. Lunch at 2. Sit around and talk until 4. Then everyone gets serious about committing art for two hours and not talking.

It was unfortunate that one of my friends wasn’t able to come because her dad had come into town at the last minute and announced that he refused to sit quietly at something like this, because he liked to talk. (Hopefully, she didn’t axe murder him over the break.)

Got a lot writing done. So did Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm). Alex did portraits and colored them. There was music. It was generally kinda awesome. Seattle folks without extended families who like the thought of no politics and no football, let me know and we’ll get you hooked up next year.

🙂

You have a few hours left to get in on the last Goodreads Giveaway before they’re all done.

Just realized last night that I’m about to start Act III of the new novel this morning. KInda awesome, all told. Won’t know until my several first readers get back to me, so I can’t tell you when it might be published. They may say go, they may say to hold it until I have the trilogy done and drop them back to back.

It’s not traditional SF. Many of you might not like it. It starts slow and literary. There’s only one Point of View character (Immortals had eleven for comparison, I think, rough counting on my fingers just now: Jessica, Nils, Tadej, Denis, Tomas, Robbie, Jouster, Moirrey, Suvi, Emmerich, and Sykes.) It is somewhere in the category of New Adult (older than YA, because the main character is 21 instead of 16), but very much a coming of age. She has decided that the best way to get revenge on the man who killed her best friend is to become a super-villain and hunt him (a costumed hero) down.

We’ll file it under SF/spandex, for now. That’s where you would find it in the book store. I would love for it to sell like Jessica or Javier. I suspect it will be more like Rick. I’m okay with that.

Was talking to Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) last night while I was experimenting with a new biscuit recipe (or rather, modifying someone’s to be entirely grain-free).

One of the neat things about the modern publishing era is that I don’t have a publisher telling me what I can and can’t write. Kristine Katheryn Rusch had a lovely blog post last week about writing to market, which is where an author sits down and looks at what they think is selling and puts out a story in that genre. And why it rarely works.

It struck me an useful, because as an Indie, I write what I want. Because I have a day job paying the bills, I can write the story  I want, the way I want, with the ending and rating I want. The jobs of my first readers and copy editors is to tell me where I leave out words, where I’m confusing, where I misspell my own name, etc. But not to tell me that I have to throw something in the trunk because nobody will buy it.

(I have, now, officially, sold at least one of every thing I have ever put up for sale on one of the big ebook sites.)

That means that someone will buy it. Will I make back the money equivalent of the time I spent writing it? Who know? And you know what? I don’t care, either. I’m not doing this to become rich and famous. (Comfortable would be nice. Anonymous at the same time would be awesome.) I’m doing this because it is a compulsion on my part.

I have been a story-teller as I long as I have had words. It brings me joy.

And the other thing that brings me joy is when I hear from a reader/fan how much they appreciated it.

Got an email from a man last week who just wanted to say thanks. Didn’t get a chance to reply until Sunday when we came into town and got connected to the interwebs (doing that from the farm is a hit and miss proposition.) We were there for about an hour while she did publishing stuff, so I managed to get three rounds of email back and forth with him, answering questions and talking about the future and Suvi.

Made my day.

Did the October financials last night, too. It’s always funny. “I sold a what, where?” Seriously. Someone in Japan bought The Blacksmith’s Song a few months ago. Hope they enjoy it and come back for more. Or send me a note asking for more. I have six volumes of poetry on a hard drive somewhere. Y’all have seen about half of one, and that’s mostly The Forestal, spanning II and III.

Someone bought The Horse Thief the other day. That was the last thing I had marked as a lifetime zero for sales.

I did a book signing in Powell’s in Beaverton, OR last week. He had bought copies of Auberon and Queen through what they call “Extended Distribution” meaning I’m in the Ingram’s Catalog and anyone can order my books at any bookstore.

Hopefully, that means I’m doing something right. Will I please all readers? No. Enough? I hope so. You? Please let me know. The opposite of love is not hatred. It is apathy. If a story riled you up, tell me. (I would prefer only good reviews on Amazon and other places, but I understand. Sometimes the story is just not right. Sometimes the reader didn’t get what they thought they would. That might be my fault. It might just be luck of the draw.)

One last thought. Well, maybe more than one. Holidays mean weird schedule, so I might not be as constant as I could be. Travel coming up to visit her family back east.

And the third Javier books, The Gilded Cage, is coming out in a few weeks. The Science Officer currently has 47 reviews on Amazon. I have been told that 50 is a magic number in their machines. If three of you could write me reviews in the next few weeks or get friends hooked on the books so they do, that would blast it out to a much wider audience. More sales equals less day-job equals more writing time from me equals more books for you to read.

So, really, I’m just looking out for you. Right?

Heh.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West Of The Mountains, WA

That was an intense weekend. (And I need fashion design help.)

OryCon, followed by my first ever book signing at Powell’s. Thanks to everyone who came out, and all the new friends I made. (And that poor girl that I talked into liking epic, military SF in spite of herself. She did at least friend me on facebook so I could apologize for dragging her down into Jessica’s world, but I suspect she wasn’t fighting too hard.)

Make your plans now.  I’ll be there next year.  And several people have threatened to make sure that the Con Committee puts me on panels, since I missed all that fun this year. Maybe, I’ll even get invited back to Powell’s again for more signings.  That was kinda awesome.

And no, I’m still only barely coherent after going for three days, then the signing, then dinner with some big gun writers that are friends of my wife and her sister, and then driving back to Seattle in the middle of the night so I could make it to work Monday morning.  (I would greatly appreciate if you could each recruit a dozen friends to buy my books so I didn’t have too day-job any more.  Pants sucks.)

Also, a bit of trivia: I’ve talked about the various definitions of readers, being social, casual, and voracious. I may have finally gotten my first collector, as well. Up until last week, there had been a story that had NEVER sold a copy, on any platform. It’s in one of the Mirror Collections, so it has been (hopefully) read, but several people have bought the first in the set (one of my favorites) and ignored the second. Sunday, on top of all the other weirdness, I finally sold a copy of The Horse Thief. Whoever, you are, congratulations on being my first official “gotta have them all” reader.  Let me know if you would like me to do something silly like sign a hard-copy of the cover for you, as a memorial trophy.  🙂

And please let me know what you think.  In my copious spare time, I have been slowly extending all of my fantasy characters.  I just turned in a new Brak story for a collection that will come out in the spring.  Suren, Kaleph, and several others will eventually bubble up, usually as palate cleansers between longer projects. (The Gilded Cage, the third Javier, was between Last of the Immortals and the current project. Have a fourth Javier planned, and just no damned time.)

What other news?

Holidays are upon us. The might mean less blogging, but mostly because I’m trying to get a novel done with all my spare time, plus I’m traveling to see the family. You’ll still see me on Facebook, and you can always email me here or there.

Winter is upon us.  I drove through chewy rain this morning, coming over the pass with a bunch of knuckleheads who probably have no business being out in the rain, let alone trying to drive in it. Soon, I’m going to have to start taking the long way around the mountains to get to work.

The new novel comes along apace.  I got to sit next to Mark Ferrari and his lovely wife, Shannon Page, at the signing, and I might be able to afford having Mark do a trio of covers for the new trilogy, which will be kinda my definition of having made it as a writer.

Also, if you know any wizards with fabric, I need some help. At OryCon, I saw a LOT of people cosplaying Manticore and the Honor Harrington books. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) leans over at one point and suggests that one of these days, someone is going to want to walk up in the uniform of a Command Centurion from Aquitaine, and that I better be able to tell them exactly how to do that.

I have the images in my head. I went back and re-read the appropriate sections of the books where I describe the uniforms. I have made it a point not to bog down the narrative with useless details, unlike some of the SF Writers I know who like to go into excruciatingly boring detail to show off. It should be just enough to carry the story along, and no more. (Tolkien and I would come to blows over the correct verbiage necessary to tell your tale, most likely.)

If you know anyone who does magic with cloth, I would appreciate an introduction. As I work out the next novel, I’m giving serious thought to uniforms, so that I can give someone the exact pattern numbers from McCalls or wherever, the correct colors, and the correct measurement ratios. (I promise more detail in Jessica’s fourth book, Goddess of War, but I’m not there yet. There are also surprises enough to keep everyone jumping and giggling.)

And, one of these days, I need to commission someone to make me an Aquitainian Navy uniform. Possibly First Fleet Lord, but we’ll see. It would be so amazingly awesome to have cosplaying fans, the last thing I want to do is look at one and say “but you did it wrong…” (Someone thwap me upside the head if it looks like those words are about to come out of my mouth, okay?)

Okay, about out of words.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

Y’all have no idea how awesome it is to meet and interact with fans. And to know people are enjoying my books.

shade and sweet water

bd

west of the mountains, WA

News Update, Round 2: The next Goodreads Giveaway (Queen of the Pirates) starts Tuesday 11/10 and runs for a week. After that, a set of giveaways for Last of the Immortals that will begin just after the book itself comes out on Nov 17. As usual, available for pre-order everywhere that allows, plus everywhere after that.

I looked at the pre-order numbers last night for Immortals.

Thank you.

Just that. When Auberon came out, I got a couple dozen pre-orders, which shocked me. Queen was good for over one hundred, which I found amazing. Immortals is very close to three hundred last I checked.

I get to write it, but I couldn’t really do this without you. I have fans that buy my books. Who leave me nice reviews places telling me how much they enjoyed the book and look forward to the next one. That actually leave me nice notes here on my boards, encouraging me. And you do.

So thank you.

In other news: Words.

It’s been on my mind for the last few days because I woke up with a touch of a cold and sore throat last Friday. Called in sick to work. Went back to bed. Let my body sweat it out and then did laundry and put down new sheets. By mid-day was feeling mostly human. Weak and brainless, but human.

Didn’t get any words done.

Saturday, headed into town to the Starbucks, because my laptop was not liking to connect via (really, freaking slow) tether to the interwebs. (Remember, I live WAY out in the boonies.) Couldn’t connect at Starbucks either.

I’m a fairly nerdy IT guy, and I was stumped. Knew what it felt like, but not how to undo it.

Fortunately, was having some friends over for a Guy Fawkes dinner and (would have had had it not been raining) bonfire. One of them, Steve, is my go-to-nerd for computer issues. (I have wonderful friends who can probably solve any problem across the group, or they know a girl who can.)

He was stumped. Tried everything he knew, and hit the same wall that had left my head bloody.

Eventually, he forced it to revert to “last known good state” which was middle of last week. (I keep all my writing on a thumbnail that I frequently back up to a NAS, and not on the laptop, so utterly safe to do that.)

That did it. Apparently, the hardware maker and Microsoft both pushed critical updates that stomped on each other and everything else in their way. It was a Godzilla kind of weekend.

Did finally manage to get back to zero on Sunday (it’s Monday as I write this). Between being kinda yucky and kinda computer-yucky, got only a few words done over the whole weekend. (Did other things that did not require brain, like burn the scrap for the bonfire, and unpack several more boxes of books and arrange them, and make the new house generally more livable.)

But I got to thinking about Words. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) asked if I wanted something like a FitBit(tm) for Christmas to track daily exercise. I said no, thank you, because I don’t track that on a daily basis. It is the same with my words. I don’t track those daily, or even weekly. And in this month of NaNoWriMo, where everyone is supposed to write a novel in a month, I don’t bother to participate that way.

I count my words across an annual basis. That way, when I have a bad, brainless weekend, I don’t feel bad that I got nothing much done. What matters is this: How am I doing against the year target? (Slightly ahead of target, possibly within striking distance of Second Stretch Goal, having made #1 already.)

My feeling is this: Why save up for NaNoWriMo and blow it all in a 30 day stretch? Why aren’t you that committed EVERY day? I’m not sprinting here. I’m on a super-mega-ultra-marathon that will finally defeat me when I die of old age, hopefully in fifty or sixty years. If I never had another original idea, I’m pretty sure I’d never get to the bottom of the current list of ideas I have written down, even then.

So write, write daily, count them, tally the words against all the words you’ve ever written, and not against everybody else.

Like I said at the top: Lots of Words.

And not all of my words are going to be for all of my readers. And I mean that in a good way.

I’m 20k into the next novel. It is a lovely, little New Adult-type story about a young woman who sets out to get revenge on the man who killed her sister, by becoming a costumed super-villain. And it is very literary. Single Point of View. Slow to build in the way that literary is, rather than slow to get to the story. (You know right at the top who, what, where, and why. How is the only piece yet to come, by the end of Chapter One.)

Fans who love action might not like this story. It is not car chases and gun fights every page. And that’s okay with me. I hope I communicate well enough to people with cover and blurb and notes NOT to expect another Jessica Keller action piece. There will be more of those. I have 10k words of planning encyclopedia for Jessica Book 4 (Goddess of War) and figure I’ll go after that early next year, when I finish the first draft of Miss Kai Di Peng and her adventures. (She’s got a trilogy coming, eventually.)

So Words. Lots of Words.

The third Javier Aritza story is coming out in December. The Gilded Cage picks up pretty much at the end of The Mind Field.  It technically makes a trilogy for Javier, but I expect Season One to run eight or maybe twelve episodes. (I did discover last week that I can do a special “Boxed Set” edition of books from one of the printing companies I work with, so I’ll probably do a mega box of Javier when I hit the end of Season One. Jessica will have to wait until I finish ALL of them, which will be nine novels, at current planned arc.)

Hopefully, you enjoy the words. And continue to come along with me for the ride. As always, I enjoy the comments. If you have questions, drop me a line or comment on something. I’ll get to it fairly quickly, presuming no more Godzilla events.

See you at OryCon, or Powell’s Books shortly.

bd

Side Note: As a race into publishing Last of the Immortals, I am doing a set of Goodreads giveaways. Auberon is going on now, and will end on 11/3. After that, we’ll do a set for Queen of the Pirates, and finally Last of the Immortals. This is your chance to own a hard-copy version, sure to be a collector’s item because I will revise all three when Book 4 comes out, hopefully sometime next year, Good Lord and Muse willing.

Also: Thank you to everyone for the comments. It really makes my day when I log in and see a lot of comments in the spam queue that I actually get to approve and display, as opposed to the bots I have to contend with on a daily basis, wanting to sell me crap, services, or ED medicine. The interwebs are really stupid that way.  (Do me a favor and update your anti-virus checkers?  Most of this crap comes from machines that have been hijacked. And if you are still running Windows XP, upgrade.  It’s faster, more stable, and less prone to crap. A good internet is your responsibility.)

🙂

I don’t have firm dates yet, but the third Javier Aritza novella is coming out in December. The Gilded Cage.  There is also a craft book I have been working on in the background for the better part of a year, when I could carve out time to put my thoughts on paper. It is something for the beginning writer, to help them understand the technical aspects of good story-telling that they need in order to  look more like a professional. They are certainly not things I learned in my creative writing classes. (Granted I never went MFA, being too much of a numbers nerd, but I have shown drafts to two people wanting to make the jump from non-fiction/journalism to genre fiction, and they both seemed to get something out of it.)

—————————————————————-

I got an email from a friend of a friend last night. She’s a big-time writer who was on a panel and got asked a question about the “usual path to publication.” They discovered that in the last 3-5 years, there is no such thing.

Times were, you wrote a novel, found an agent, got rejected 10-15 times, and then finally either gave up or got published. If you were lucky, you wrote something that sold and your next novel got picked up. Quite a few were, then less and less.

Some folks made a living as mid-list writers, earning as much as they would have at a desk job, but getting to write all day instead of labor.

Those days are mostly gone now. If you don’t capture lightning, if you don’t sell millions of copies world-over, you get dropped.

Such is the fate of many traditionally published novelists.

Other folks write short fiction and submit it to various genre magazines and anthologies. There is less money here, as a single story will net you somewhere between $200US and $500US. I.E. not enough to live on, unless you have a spouse who can support your dreams. Many people do this, and are quite happy, if not wealthy.

And then there is Jeff Bezos. He invented the future.

I married my publisher, a successful novelist who once had several books traditionally published by one of the big houses, and who still sells into the periodical space with mysteries and stuff.

She also  indie publishes. Her nineteenth(?) novel is due out in December. She is about halfway through re-publishing a baker’s dozen of short pieces, from all across the genre, one per week.  Go look.

I don’t do traditional publishing. Everyone I know who has (and I know a bunch of nice folks through her), universally tell me horror stories about it. You have one chance in a million to make it to the big time.

I don’t need the fame. I’d rather have money.

I  indie publish. (While I technically have submitted two stories to The New Yorker, that was because they do literary Science Fiction there, and both of the Hive stories are kinda literary. After this, every Hive story goes to them first for quick rejection, because I like their rejection policy and approve of it.)

When I publish, my works are passed through a couple of first readers who catch mistakes and holes in my logic, plus a copy editor who finds missing words, bad tense, and lost periods. (She’s amazing that way.)

Then it gets a cover, a blurb, maybe some internals like an Author’s note. And then it goes up for sale on the usual sites.  We do post them on Kobo, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble, but the vast majority of my sales come from Amazon.  As in, ninety-seven percent plus.

Jeff made that possible. And he’s going to win the 21st Century. Period.

The Traditional Manhattan Model of publishing (see above) was all about being gate-keepers to what was “Good Literature.” They decided if you were good enough. Over the last generation, they’ve devolved into a useless money and marketing grab. I will point out that Kim Kardassian and Snooki are both New York Times Best Selling Authors.

Yes, you read that right. Quality literature, right?

Because of Jeff Bezos, I get to publish novels and novellas and short stories. You get to decide if they are any good. You get to log in and give the story a rating and a review, so the next person who comes along can read it and determine if they want to give me money. It’s not much money, but one of these days it might be enough for me to no longer have a day job.

I get to do what I love most in this world, which is to tell stories. And I seem to have fans, as weird as that is to someone like me. People send me notes telling me how much they like Suvi, and how much they enjoyed a particular piece. That energizes me to go at it again tomorrow.

To give you an understanding of how much I want this: I get up at 4:30 AM. Wake up, mind you. My alarm actually goes off about once per month. I’m generally awake before the alarm. Shower and out the door with breakfast in hand by 4:55. Listen to NPR for the news until I get over the pass, and then turn it off and let the story unfold in my head for the last half hour or so. Get to work, park, head up to the office, and set up my machine in the kitchen/break room at 6:00 AM. Eat breakfast, read the news, pay bills, catch up. Around 6:30, start writing. Head down, keys banging furiously, snarl at anyone who comes over to bother me. (They’ve learned to wait until I surface, unless the building is on fire.) At 8:00, fix my second coffee, pack up, and head to my desk, where I go at it in t-sql until 17:00, with a long walk at lunch to think more story thoughts. Most nights, home and ready to start working again around 19:00 (I live way out in the boonies.) Put in a couple of hours of work. Go to bed around 21:00. Rinse. Repeat. On the weekend, I live for the times when I can spend hours and hours writing.

There is a motivational poster at work that sums it up. “There is a difference between wanting and committing.”

I don’t want an editor or Traditional publisher telling me what I can write, or when, or how. I will live or die on my own merits, my own strengths and weaknesses, on my own story-telling.

Because of Jeff, I get that chance.

One of the hardest tasks for a writer is to find someone who can read what you have written with a critical-enough eye to help, while not being a complete ass about things. Being a First Reader is a skill set, one that takes time to learn.

It is necessary to be able to read something, and respond to it. (A copy editor and a line editor are technical tasks that take place later in the writing cycle.) When I look for a potential new First Reader, I want someone who can tell me they don’t understand a particular paragraph, without telling me how to fix it. (If a reader tells you a sentence is wrong, they are almost always right. If a writer tells you how to fix that sentence, they are almost always wrong.)

When I do first readings for my wife, I simply say awkward, or I want more here, or frequently, things in your head didn’t make it onto the page. Nothing more. My job is to point out the rough patches, so she can fix it. She does the same for me. The job of a First Reader is thus.

Where it gets messy is in the metaphor we call the Chairmaker. As a First Reader, the job is to comment on the quality of the chair. Is it even? Balanced? Stable? Pretty? The trap that many writers fall into when reading other people’s work is to begin to critique the chairmaker, and not just the chair. I can fix the chair. I can’t really fix the chairmaker. And I’m likely to get personally offended by literary assaults on the chairmaker.

It happens. I used to have a fantastic First Reader, once upon a time. She caught all manner of things, as a result of an English Lit background. As she was mostly a musician, rather than a writer, so she wasn’t planning to compete with me to see who could be a better writer.

And then one day, something bad happened. I never did figure out what. She went from happily marking up a document with two or three comments per page, to two or three comments per paragraph. And I was still writing like I did. And all her complaints were about Voice.

Voice is the style of telling a story, so that you hear in your head in the voice of the character talking. Voice is not just what they see, but how they feel about what they see.

If you have read any of my fiction, you know that I write in what is called Third Person Close (as opposed to First Person, like hard-boiled detective novels; or Third Person Universal, which was a style in the mid-century, where you knew what everyone thought at all times, as a universal narrator.)

She suddenly decided that what she wanted was for me to move everything to third universal, by pulling out all of the Voice, all of the opinions, and simply state things in a dry, journalistic narrative. I showed her marked-up document to other writers, and they whistled. It was red with blood.

She had mentioned to me that her mother was an English teacher, so I suppose she decided that she needed to grade my work like something I had turned in for one of her class assignments.

It was not an assignment I suspect that I would have gotten a passing grade on.

And that was that. I wasn’t interested in the level of personal invective she was throwing at me on paper, regardless of whether her intentions were innocent or malevolent.

She had stopped judging the chair, and started judging the chairmaker.

It was a shame. She had been good. But I never used her as a First Reader again.

And I drew an important lesson from this. Whenever someone asks me to be a First Reader for them (and writers commonly trade that sort of thing), I always make sure I only react to what’s on the page, and never to the person behind it. It is not my story, it is not my world. My job is to help them understand how to make it better, not all the things they are doing wrong. That would be to overstep my bounds.

Ultimately, the reader will judge the final work. If I tell good stories, they will come back for more. That’s a matter of style and voice. The role of the First Reader is to help understand where the story-telling broke down. (The Copy Editor and Line Editor come next, and are something for a later tale.)

And each of us have a job in how we help others get to where they want to be.

——–

And before I forget (again): Tell your friends. I have another goodreads giveaway of Auberon that starts 10/26 and runs for a week, followed by a giveaway of Queen of the Pirates for a week, and finally I will give away several copies of Last of the Immortals that last week when it goes live.  Ping me for more details.

Recently, I got into an interesting discussion with an (visual) artist friend of mine about some of the differences between so-called modern entertainment and genre science fiction. One thing that has always struck me as interesting is the prevalence of what we would today call “product placement.”

It’s not a recent thing, as far as popular media goes. We were talking about the new James Bond movie coming out shortly, which is the 24th in the series. For the previous movie, a certain Latin American beer company had paid a tremendous amount of money for their product to appear in Bond’s hands in an important way, and they milked that for a major global advertising campaign. But that is not a new thing. Anyone who has read the early Bond novels by Fleming will recognize the long list of products that encompass Bond’s breakfast each morning, or his wardrobe, etc.

In those cases, Fleming appeared to be specifically placing Bond in a particular stratum of British society (a carefully striated civilization to begin with). We know what jam he prefers, what shirts he wears, etc. Even his personal variant on a martini says a lot about him (and frequently spurs wonderful flame wars on the interwebs over whether or not he’s doing it right. I have no opinion, not being a martini drinker.)

But when you look at things outside the twentieth century, wandering into the realms of distant science fiction, the amount of name dropping falls off. I could talk about Koensayr Corporation, but only the most devoted nerds would be able to understand the reference without first consulting the googles. And that just tells you what my favorite starship is. (And only the truly nerdy will understand the importance of when Lex Luthor steals forty cakes.)

And granted, it may just be me, or I’m not reading the right books, or something. I think back to Doc Smith’s Lensman books and he was wonderful about dropping names everywhere. I can’t be the only kid who wanted to own a Lewiston or a DeLameter growing up.

So here’s the question we were ruminating upon over beers: When the writer goes to that level of detail, to inject the name of the factory that built the spaceship, or the name of the soda pop that the hero pulls from his fridge at the end of a hot, busy day, does that add to the story for you or distract?

I can’t be an impartial judge in this one, because I’ve done it. In my story Moscow Gold, I wanted to include the make and model of the car that the villains are driving. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) quietly suggested that I not use the name of a real car maker from the day, even in my alternate diesel-punk universe. Did you know that there is a wiki page listing EVERY known defunct car maker, ever?  Seriously, it’s huge. You want to lose a day? Go wander down that rabbit hole sometime. I did.

But I had a reason. The chances are extremely slim, but north of zero, however far north, that I might manage to run into a troll who happened to own the rights to the car manufacturer I picked blindly from a hat, and that person would come after me with a bitch and DMCA. After all, nobody would mind Bond suddenly wearing their shirt in a book, or imbibing their soft drink, but they’re going to be less than enthusiastic if that same item suddenly pops up in the hands of the bad guy. Unless they specifically paid you money for it. (At that point, there is no such thing as bad publicity if you can control the narrative.  Because when people get to arguing over the topic, a much wider audience will become exposed to it and suddenly wonder what the fuss is. That means sales.)

But will you still be able to eat a whopper in a distopian future where all restaurants are Taco Bell? Will Coca-Cola still be the pause that refreshes, say, one thousand years into the future?

This is on my mind because I am about to publish a new Jessica Keller novel that takes place in 13,441 CE. And I just finished the first draft on the third Javier Aritza story, and it takes place in 7,548 CE. We’re still human, but what the hell would we order when we walk into a bar? What would we grab from a convenience store at 3 in the morning?

Do you, the reader, want to know what brand of burritos keeps Javier going? Or what brand of distilled spirit Jessica Keller consumes when she’s between assignments and doesn’t have to be ON constantly?

I’ll be starting to work on a new novel (series) shortly, set in a variant modern era. As in, last Tuesday, but with POWER. Would Kai Di’s choice of handbag maker influence your thinking? Do you want to know what kind of car she drives, if it doesn’t factor centrally to the story? (Everybody knows Bond drives an Astin-Martin. I suspect they’ve stayed in business as long as they have in part on the strength of that association, which once upon a time conveyed posh to the right folks.)

I don’t have answers. I have questions.

But I would like you to think about the next few books you read and see what level of product placement they contain. And let me know how it made you feel. I do read all comments, and respond. I get direct emails with questions as well and try to jump on those directly.

So let me know, okay?

shade and sweet water

bd

west of the mountains, WA

There are several ways to approach fiction writing. None of them are better than any other, as far as I can tell. They are just tools in the toolbox. As you advance in your craft, you learn to make use of them as you go, depending on the needs of the story.

1. You can work out every element of the story ahead of time, including every twist and turn. You’ll end up spending a great deal of time on the outline for the story, but the writing can go full speed, because you have it all worked out at that point.
2. Write into what I call “darkened hallways.” I have a tendency to be there most of the time. You’ll have the characters, the overall plot, and the opening scene. You’ll have a pretty good idea how it ends. Everything in the middle will be guesswork, because you know roughly where you are going, but not when you’ll get there. Think of a long hallway with occasional light bulbs that are far too inadequate to the task.
3. Writing into darkness. You start similar to the path of darkened hallways. But you get derailed. Or rather, you have a character, and she has a problem, and you (the writer/reader) are simply along for the ride, with no idea where it will all end up.

This is all fresh in my mind this morning because it happened to me last night. I’ve been working on the the third Javier Aritza story. I thought I knew how it ended. Turns out I had the exact ending (call it the last four lines of the epilogue).  Javier had been lying to me about how we get there. He finally explained it to me last night.

I can’t say I blame him. It was not what I had planned. Or where. And it was a LOT darker than I had expected.

Let me back up here and share a confession. In my head, Javier Aritza is kind of a goofball. He’s snarky and sarcastic, mouthy, but generally harmless.

To prepare for the third volume, I went back and re-read the first two (The Science Officer and The Mind Field). Up until that moment, I hadn’t really been paying attention to how dark and gritty he really was. Or the stories. Writer-brain put those things in when I wasn’t looking. They make the story better, but it wasn’t the story I had expected. Or rather, it was, but nowhere near as dark as I had remembered.

Javier did that to me last night.  When he finally revealed the ending to volume three.

For comparison’s sake, all three Jessica Keller books were darkened hallways. I knew where they went, and how they ended, and happily trusted writer-brain to carry me there. And it worked. I like all three novels.

I like all three Science Officer tales, too, but volume three (The Gilded Cage) is much darker than Jessica. And it was jarring to see what secrets writer-brain was hiding from me, right up to the end. (And no, no spoilers here.) This had been a slow write, because life kept intruding, and because I rarely knew what the scene after next was. I would sit down, and writer-brain would say “here’s the next scene.” “But that about the one after that?” “Shut up and write.”

And now I know why. Javier can be a cold, vicious bastard when you push him into a corner.

I’ll have the first draft done and ready for first readers this week. Dunno when it is coming out at this point. I’ve been pushing deadlines all year, and this one doesn’t have one. I’m guessing that mid-December is the publishing date, barring unforeseen complications.  (Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) talked to Matt and he’s all set to do the audio book again. We’re going to try to get paper, ebook, and audio all done together. Watch this space for more news.) So that will make a nice Xmas present for everyone to round out the year.

I’m writing into darkness here. And it’s fun. The strangest part is that once I finish this story, I don’t have anything NEXT on my list. Got the anthology story done. Got the third Javier out. Jessica’s first trilogy is rounded off and I’m doing research for what will be book 4 next year.

What would y’all like to see next? I mean, I only have fifty things I could pick from.  What would make your day?

shade and sweet water

bd